Lou Dobbs, Former Fox Business Host and Trump Booster, Dies at 78

Lou Dobbs, the conservative television and radio host who used his platforms at CNN and Fox Business to promote baseless conspiracy theories and who became an ardent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, has died. He was 78.

His death was confirmed on Thursday on Mr. Dobbs’s website and social media accounts after Mr. Trump announced it on the Truth Social platform. No cause of death was given, and it was not immediately clear where or when he died. Mr. Dobbs had been absent from “The Great America Show,” his podcast on the iHeartRadio network, for several weeks.

While at CNN in the mid-2000s, Mr. Dobbs was part of a stable of cable hosts, along with Bill O’Reilly at Fox News and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, who built national profiles as aggressively opinionated talkers.

Although CNN sought to position itself as a home for straight news, Mr. Dobbs’s 6 p.m. news program was accompanied with the disclaimer that it would contain “news, debate and opinion.”

In addition to voicing his opposition to illegal immigration, Mr. Dobbs also questioned President Barack Obama’s birthplace, helping to elevate a bogus conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had also embraced.

He abruptly left CNN in 2009 and later joined Fox Business, lured by the network’s co-founder Roger Ailes. In 2021, Fox canceled his weekday television show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” after it become a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential race.

Mr. Dobbs’s decade-long tenure at the network ended only a day after the election technology company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corporation and Fox News. The suit also named Mr. Dobbs as well as the Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro as defendants.

He started his podcast on iHeartRadio later that year.

A full obituary will follow.