Dem
51
GOP
49
As we note above, Tucker Carlson wasn't the only high-profile cable TV personality to lose his job yesterday. Within an hour (and maybe within a half an hour) of the news of Carlson's demise, CNN announced that it was letting Don Lemon go after 17 years with the network.
Lemon was apparently blindsided by the news, and he responded by posting a rather strange screed to Twitter. It wasn't the angry verbiage that was strange, though, it was the enormous font and purple lettering, making it seem as if Lemon doesn't really understand how to use Word (or NotePad or TextEdit or whatever he was using).
It's a shame that Lemon lost his job now, of all times. Our guess is that if CNN had just given him another month, he might finally have said something useful or interesting. In other words, if you can't tell, we're not fans. And we're actually surprised, given how little Lemon seems to bring to the table, that he survived this long. After all, he was regularly enmeshed in controversy, from his buddy-buddy relationship with the unethical sleazeball Chris Cuomo to his recent tacky remarks about Nikki Haley, and how a woman in her (early) fifties is past her prime. Lemon has also been the subject of numerous rumors about backstage sexism (stretching back 15+ years or, in effect, his entire CNN tenure), and he's also raised eyebrows with some of his problematic interview questions, most notably of the women who accused Bill Cosby of rape.
We have rather less to say about Lemon than we did about Carlson because, of course, Lemon is far less influential than Carlson. So, his firing is far less consequential. That said, we will note that it just can't be a coincidence that the two terminations became public within an hour of each other. The popular theory is that Lemon found out, at some point in the past week, that the end was near, and that when Carlson was canned, Lemon rushed to Twitter to tell about his own firing before Tucker could suck up all the oxygen. Maybe, but that seems convoluted to us. Our guess is that CNN has already gotten a lot of the wrong kind of coverage with all its staff turnover in the last year or so, and that the network bigwigs were hoping to bury this particular story as much as possible, and so pulled the trigger (perhaps a few days earlier than planned) so as to take advantage of the shadow cast by Carlson.
Whatever the behind-the-scenes dynamics are, the deed is done, and Lemon is out. Who knows what's next for him; maybe he'll join Cuomo at News Nation, and they can both be watched by nobody. As to CNN, we foresee the hiring or promotion of another milquetoast figure, albeit one clever enough not to stick their foot in their mouth every other month or so. (Z)