Ed Rollins
CNN Senior Political Contributor

In this past week of very important news - when the president presided over the memorial service for the slain soldiers of Fort Hood and departed on his first Asia trip, and the attorney general made the controversial decision to treat the mastermind terrorist of 9/11 as a criminal to be tried in a Manhattan civilian courtroom - the story of the departure of longtime CNN anchor Lou Dobbs still jumped out.

CNN did its usual first-rate job of covering those other stories, but the Dobbs departure is still somewhat of a mystery. It is a hard story to cover, because Lou is family. And it's far more than a story about changing anchors. It's a story about the direction of the "news business" and cable television's role in that business.

Lou Dobbs is the last of the original news anchors hired by Ted Turner; he started with CNN in 1980. Over the past 30 years, he has been one of the stars and certainly one of the biggest names in the cable news business. As was obvious to anyone who watched or knew Lou personally, he was a big personality who edited and ran his own show.

He evolved over that period from a mainstream Republican who was an expert on the business world to an independent who represented the anger and plight of the working class. His resignation Wednesday caught nearly everybody by surprise, including his staff and certainly his viewers.

Keep Reading...