Fox News’ Tucker Carlson attacked CNN’s Don Lemon Wednesday over differences he sees in Lemon’s broadcasts from seven years ago and today.
“If you’re running a channel like CNN, you want dumb people on TV because they’re compliant. They’ll say what they’re told. They’ll tell the audience what the moment demands. They’ll never stray from the script and that’s exactly what Mr. Lemon is doing. But just seven years ago, it was a different country and people were kind of allowed to say what they thought was true,” Carlson explained while a graphic that read “CNN’s Lemon Wasn’t Always Like This” aired underneath.
Carlson rolled an old clip of Lemon lambasting Black families for having a high rate of “absent fathers” and pleading with “Black folks” to “pay attention to and think about what has been presented in recent history as acceptable behavior.”
In the clip, Lemon went on to warn against hip hop and rap culture and their effects on communities of color.
“Wow,” Carlson replied incredulously. “Can you imagine what would happen if Don Lemon or the bodybuilding buddy over there or any of these hairhats said something like that on CNN tonight or MSNBC? That would be their last live broadcast ever.”
Earlier this week, Lemon himself addressed his evolution as a journalist and the ways in which his coverage and approach have changed over the years he’s been on CNN.
“People wonder if I’ve changed as a journalist,” he told The Hollywood Reporter’s Nekesa Mumbi Moody in conversation during the Promax conference. “I mean, I’ve always been the same person. I’ve always had the same experiences. It’s just that now, I think, I feel more comfortable in what I do. I think I’ve evolved. And people — that happens to anyone who lives. If you live long enough, you’re gonna evolve, right? If you do a job long enough, you become more comfortable at it. You become better at it. Being a person, a Black man — let’s put it this way: being an American who happens to be Black, who happens to be gay, from the South, I have a certain lens that I view the world through and that’s not necessarily a bias. That’s my experience.”
Tucker ends Don 🍋 pic.twitter.com/g6YoDamEZq
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 9, 2020