In an interview with GQ, CNN boss Jeff Zucker concedes anchor Don Lemon “is a little bit of a lightning rod,” but adds “frankly, we needed a little bit of lightning.”
Lemon’s rise at CNN, of course, has coincided with the “CNN Tonight” anchor’s reputation for uttering “Lemonisms” and often for simply doing the silly, like anchoring from inside a “Blizzardmobile” in a storm that fizzled:
CNN had installed its CNN-iest talent to anchor an hour of television that came to embody all the things that people loathe about CNN—the empty news-like product: questions, but no answers. Who knew anything new by the end of those hours? CNN’s Malaysian-flight coverage became a punch line of flood-the-zone cable-news excess, and Don Lemon was the face of it.
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GQ correspondent Taffy Brodesser-Akner went back and watched the most widely reported of Lemon’s “gaffes”–could the missing plane have flown into a black hole, for instance–and came away entirely unconvinced that Lemon deserves to be a punching bag:
I went and watched those clips again, and it turns out none of them are quite as dumb as advertised. The black-hole question wasn’t actually Lemon’s question; it was submitted by a viewer over Twitter, and he passed it along to an expert, calling it “preposterous.”