A year after leaving CNN, Lou Dobbs is announcing the launch of a new cable news show. This time, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation will be his new home. Dobbs is joining Fox Business Channel in 2011.
"Fox is the perfect fit for me," Dobbs told The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz.
"I've known [Fox News CEO] Roger Ailes a long time, have the utmost respect for him. He is one of the smartest guys, period, not just one of the smartest executives," Dobbs said.
"Dobbs' show will premiere in early 2011," the Los Angeles Times reported. "He will also appear on other Fox Business programming."
Fox Business Network President Kevin Magee told Kurtz that he was excited have Dobbs on board. "He's been a controversial guy over the years," Magee said. "People who speak their minds and have strong opinions usually are."
For months, Dobbs considered running for office. "I spent about six, seven months really entertaining a lot of thoughts, discussing it with people who were urging me to do it," Dobbs said. "It seemed clear that wasn't what would be satisfying to me."
After Dobbs parted ways with CNN last year, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera predicted that he wouldn't be coming to the network.
"I can tell you proudly, when [Dobbs] was widely rumored to be coming to my network, I called my boss... and he said it's absolutely untrue," Rivera announced at a luncheon for Latinos.
"Lou Dobbs is almost single-handedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country," Rivera told the audience.
Dobbs has also been criticized for promoting the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama may not be a US citizen. Speaking on his radio show, Dobbs stood up a "birther" who questioned the validity of Obama's birth certificate.
"There are real questions here that need to be answered," he told a caller. "And people talk about, quote-unquote, the lunatic fringe are the only ones interested in this, and it turns out that reasonable people should be interested, and reasonable -- excuse me -- reasonable minds have to understand what's going on."
"And this can be dismissed with one -- the production of one simple little document, and that's a birth certificate. It's extraordinary," he said.
In August 2008, Factcheck.org debunked the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory.
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