Posted in Dobbsy Awards by Mark Potok
The first wave of nominations are in, and one man stands head and shoulders above the rest to claim our inaugural Dobbsy Award – Neil Cavuto of Fox News.
The host of "Your World with Neil Cavuto" used his program to put the blame for the subprime mortgage meltdown squarely where he believes it belongs – on the shoulders of poor minorities who have dared try to own a home. In doing so, Cavuto has exemplified what it means to be a Dobbsy winner – a "mainstream" figure who makes utterly false or misleading statements that denigrate or defame an entire group of people.
Cavuto played Pin-the-Blame-on-the-Minority during a Sept. 18 interview with U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.).
"[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership… . Are you totally without culpability here?" he asked. "Are you totally blameless? Are you totally irresponsible of anything that happened?"
And just in case the audience didn't catch his drift, he later spelled it out.
"I'm just saying, I don't remember a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster,'" he said.
That's right. In Cavuto's world, the real problem isn't Wall Street greed or lax federal regulation of reckless banking behemoths. No, it's all a matter of those irresponsible minorities who were willing to destroy the country's economy for a two-bedroom home in the 'burbs.
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2008/10/06/cavuto-mortgage-dobbsy/?splcnewsletter=newsgen-101308
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