Licht’s Lemonade

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Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of the American media industry. Tonight, the inside scoop on the Don Lemon fiasco, and what it reveals about the crisis at CNN.

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Licht’s Lemonade

The Don Lemon “women-in-their-prime” fiasco has become the quintessential scandal of New CNN—a microcosm of Zaz’s prerogatives, the network’s ratings struggles, Licht’s operational inexperience, and the realities of the Dantean journey through the decline of cable news.

DYLAN BYERS

Last Thursday, during an otherwise milquetoast political segment on the inertly-rated CNN This Morning, Don Lemon spontaneously self-immolated, and then some. After airing a campaign ad in which Nikki Haley called for competency tests for people aged 75 and above—a thinly-veiled dig at her former boss and now 2024 rival, Donald Trump—Lemon mused that Haley was being hypocritical. After all, Lemon argued, women were considered to be in their “prime” in their 20s, 30s, and maybe 40s. Haley, a former governor and U.N. ambassador, is 51. When co-host Poppy Harlow pushed back, appearing genuinely shocked, Lemon obnoxiously countered that she “Google it,” as if the accelerated decrepitude of her gender was a scientific fact...

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