CNN’s Don Lemon: ‘I’m Not An Opinion Host … I Get It Right’

Conservative News DailyAugust 16, 2021

In order to reduce vaccination hesitancy and halt the spread of the Delta variant, CNN’s Don Lemon has said he will have to help Fox News viewers become more “media literate,” because he’s a straight shooter, “not an opinion host.”

The host dedicated last Thursday’s episode of “Don Lemon Tonight” to examining the spread of COVID-19 in his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Amid interviews with numerous patients and Governor John Bel Edwards (D), Lemon took a swipe at Fox News — and positioned himself as uniquely capable of educating its benighted audience.

Lemon began by strangely insulting his own viewers, seemingly implying that they don’t get around as much as he does. “It’s easy to sit behind — I don’t mean a camera like me, because I meet people all the time — behind your television, in front of your televisions at home, and you judge people,” he said, because they “don’t have as much information or as much knowledge as you have.”

Then he turned to Fox News. After acknowledging that “there are a whole lot of people out there where politics doesn’t have anything to do with” their decision not to get vaccinated, he blamed former President Donald Trump and other right-of-center forces for the unvaccinated population’s purported ignorance, confusion, and refusal to believe CNN.

“I think that because of what happened over the last couple of years — the attacks on our institutions, the attacks on the First Amendment, the attacks on journalism which is covered in the First Amendment — that people wrongly don’t know who to trust,” Lemon intoned. “They believe the propaganda on certain networks. They believe the propaganda on social media.”

Lemon said he and his viewers would have to “help viewers become more media literate.”

“I’m not an opinion host. I give my point of view,” he said, apparently unaware of his self-contradiction.

“Everything I say, every single night, is based in fact,” he insisted. “And if I screw it up, I come back and apologize, and I get it right.”

“That’s what we do here at CNN,” he continued. “That is the big difference between us and networks that don’t have to operate in that realm.”

Yet network insiders seemingly admitted their political bias to Project Veritas, which caught CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester bragging about his role in driving the Republican Party out of the White House. “Look what we did: We [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out,” he said in an undercover video. “I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that.”

Yet the left-leaning network publicly considers itself and its hosts honest brokers, as do their supporters in the Democratic Party.

President Joe Biden called Lemon “one of the most informed journalists in the country” during a town hall meeting in Cincinnati late last month.

That came shortly after Lemon opined, “I don’t know if America sees black people and especially black gay men as fully human.”

In January, Lemon said the rioters whose months-long campaign of arson and vandalism inflicted billions of dollars worth of damage to U.S. cities and localities, were morally superior to the D.C. rioters of January 6. “You can’t compare what happened this summer [BLM riots] to what happened at the Capitol,” he said, because BLM grounded its message in “facts.”

In 2017, Lemon opined, without evidence, that then-President Donald Trump may suffer from “early-onset dementia.”

While CNN still holds itself out as “the most trusted name in news,” many of its critics would disagree that the network — or Lemon — qualify as unbiased arbiters of truth.

Lemon’s comments bring to mind a quotation from the late, British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.