CNN anchor Don Lemon sat down for an interview with GQ for their May issue.
The author acknowledged that, in many circles, Lemon is a veritable punchline. His numerous faux pas include asking an Islamic scholar if he supports ISIS, declaring that he smelled marijuana in the air “obviously” while on the ground in Ferguson and asking a woman who was allegedly raped by Bill Cosby why she didn’t use her teeth to defend herself. Yet, the author maintains that these missteps are an indication of his strength as an unflappable man who is unbothered by his mistakes.
For instance, during their interview, Lemon corrects the author’s pronunciation of sorbet, insisting, “It’s pronounced sorbette.” The author politely accepts his pronunciation, but when Lemon orders the dessert with a waiter, he is promptly corrected. However, Lemon does not apologize or appear flustered by his error. He simply nods and says, “That’s what I’ll have then.”
Lemon was first hired by Fox before jumping to NBC stations in Philadelphia and Chicago. He earned an Emmy for a report on the real estate market and received an Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of the D.C. Sniper in 2002. He joined CNN in 2006. The 49-year-old, who now holds the 10 p.m. spot, is one of CNN’s breakout stars. His ratings are close to those of Anderson Cooper’s and compete well with anchors at other stations with the same time slot.
Still, many would consider him more infamous than popular. The negative sentiment seems to have started with his report on July 27, 2013 when he directly addressed black people with his list of five solutions for the black community’s problems.
“I didn’t think I was saying anything bad. Just: Always respect yourself. Go to school. I mean—” and here he laughs a little—”I think they’re used to me just having a one-way conversation, just reading the prompter and going, ‘Okay, what do you think? What do you think?’ Maybe they were just sort of surprised that I actually have a point of view.”
The article also addresses Lemon’s sexual abuse. He was molested as a child by a teenaged boy who lived nearby. He didn’t share the information with anyone for a very long time and actually came out publicly as a survivor of sexual abuse while covering a segment on another sexual abuse case for CNN.
Later, Lemon shares that his experience is what led him to ask the widely criticized question to the Cosby accuser. He said that when he was a child being forced to perform oral sex on his molester, he threatened to bite his privates off, which is what finally stopped the abuse.
CNN president Jeff Zucker said, “There’s certainly a lot of interest in Don Lemon, and that’s a good thing for Don and for CNN. You know, Don is a little bit of a lightning rod. Frankly, we needed a little bit of lightning.”
Lemon explained that his job is about keeping up conversation.
“When you’re a network-news anchor, you have a twenty-two-minute news hole, and you read not even five minutes of copy, if you read that much,” Lemon tells me. “When you’re a cable-news host, you’re on for hours and hours and hours live. Right? Sometimes there’s nothing in that box, no words.”
Overall, one gets the impression that Lemon is who he is and he makes no apologies for it.
“This is 2015, and we live in an age of tweets and GIFs designed to make jokes out of people, and Don Lemon seems custom-built for perpetuating what we’ve decided is his essential Don Lemonness…I detected something like regret or humiliation behind his eyes, but he’ll never let us see more than a flicker, if that. No, Don Lemon isn’t Murrow or Cronkite. He may not be the steady, infallible news anchor America needs right now. But he sure feels like the anchor we deserve.”
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