Lemon’s Lightning

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Happy Friday, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of American media. This evening, we go back inside CNN, yet again, to make sense of Don Lemon, Charles Barkley, and the great Lichtian programming dilemma.

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Lemon’s Lightning

More news and notes on the Lemon saga, the Barkley-Gayle question, and ‘CNN This Morning.’

DYLAN BYERS

This week, while CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht was trying to bring a modicum of closure to the enduring Don Lemon “women-in-their-prime” fiasco, a national media micro-imbroglio that has become a microcosm of the network’s various challenges—tighter budgets, falling ratings, more fragile egos, ever newer data sets that a bygone era keeps ending—Charles Barkley decided to weigh in. The ever-candid Hall of Fame basketball player and star analyst of The NBA on TNT, who also happens to be up for a role on CNN, offered his own candid assessment of the news network’s current predicament in an interview with the New York Post...

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