Former CNN host Don Lemon says his old network has nobody to blame but itself after President Donald Trump barred CNN and two other news organizations from the White House.
Jim Acosta, another former CNN host, also responded to the ban. Both men pointed back to concerns they had raised about the way the network handled Trump.
Fired After 17 Years at CNN
Lemon’s swipe carries a particular sting because of how his own tenure at the network ended. He started at CNN in 2006 and moved into primetime in 2014 with “Don Lemon Tonight.” On Monday, he announced that the run was over, writing that his agent had delivered the news that morning and that he was stunned.
“After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly,” he wrote.
Lemon, who was 57 at the time, added that he had never been given any signal he would be unable to keep doing the work he loved at the network, and that larger issues were clearly in play. He also thanked the colleagues and teams he had worked alongside.
CNN disputed his account the same day, saying he had been offered a meeting with management and had put out a statement instead. Chris Licht was running the network at the time.
The firing followed a turbulent stretch for the anchor. Months earlier, he had been criticized for remarks he made on the air that were seen as sexist. Weeks before his termination, he faced a string of workplace misconduct accusations. Sunny Hostin, co-host of “The View,” argued at the time that the firing was undeserved, noting that Lemon had apologized.
Two Firings in One News Cycle
Lemon’s exit did not even own the news cycle it landed in. The firing of Fox News host Tucker Carlson was announced the same day, collapsing the fates of two prominent cable news primetime figures into a single frantic day.
Late-night comedy pounced on the Carlson half of the story. On “The Daily Show,” correspondent Desi Lydic worked the anchor chair, marveling that Fox News had cut loose its most popular anchor and needling MSNBC along the way. Late-night host Stephen Colbert, whose “The Late Show” had the week off, stayed out of it.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow devoted roughly 20 minutes of her Monday program to the subject, and she built it as a history lesson rather than a victory lap. She began in 1936, with a rally that packed in a crowd of more than 100,000 for Father Charles Coughlin, then the country’s most popular radio host. From there she traced a line through conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, through Glenn Beck, who left Fox News in 2011, and on to Bill O’Reilly, whom Fox fired in 2017. Carlson, she argued, was simply the newest name on that list.
“Whoever is dominant for their time gets smaller and smaller and smaller over time,” Maddow said. She also observed that success in conservative media is reliably replaceable, and that it rarely transfers anywhere outside of it.
The audience numbers from that night underscored the stakes. “Maddow” pulled 2,734,000 total viewers, according to Nielsen, edging Fox News’ “Hannity” at 2,531,000. CNN, meanwhile, was regularly finishing third among the cable news networks in 2023 — the backdrop against which the network’s talent decisions were being judged.
Lemon’s Charge Against His Old Network
The criticism lands on CNN, a Warner Bros. Discovery property, from two well-known faces it no longer employs. Lemon spent 17 years there before the 2023 termination he learned about from his agent. Acosta built his profile at the network sparring with Trump. Both are outside the building, and both are treating the White House ban as proof of the warnings they say they gave.