Dobbs, ‘Nightly News’ Attack British Security Firm
Liberal Democratic sources behind the story go unmentioned as more fears raised.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
March 10, 2006

     As the port management controversy churned inside Washington, CNN’s Lou Dobbs and NBC’s Chip Reid attacked a British firm that contracts security services to the Department of Homeland Security. But they did not reveal that the allegations against Wackenhut Services came to the media’s attention via two liberal Democratic congressmen who have criticized the Dubai Ports deal.

     CNN’s Lou Dobbs appeared to be the first in the broadcast media to report on March 6 about security concerns at the headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.

     “It turns out private guards at the department’s headquarters in Washington now say they don’t have enough training, nor equipment to provide security to headquarters,” Dobbs reported. After adding that the private contractor providing security at DHS, Wackenhut Services, is “owned by a firm based in Great Britain,” he snidely asked, “Feeling reassured now?”

     Dobbs left out that the news was broken by liberal Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a fact that his own network reported an hour earlier on its Web site, CNN.com.

     Dorgan and Wyden were early critics of the Dubai Ports deal, citing concerns about ownership of Dubai Ports World by the government of the United Arab Emirates.

     On March 9, NBC’s Chip Reid similarly neglected to mention to viewers that Dorgan and Wyden were the source of the allegations against Wackenhut, although Reid included a sound bite of Dorgan in his story and, like Dobbs, gratuitously raised the security firm’s British ownership, without explaining why, if at all, it was relevant to national security.

     The Business & Media Institute has documented fear-mongering attacks on foreign ownership of businesses within the United States.