“CNN This Morning” Don Lemon defends the accusations that the cable channel is liberally biased.
“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert asked Lemon during Monday’s episode about his new boss, CEO Chris Licht, who has made sweeping programming changes at CNN. Licht served concurrently as executive producer and showrunner on the CBS sitcom “Showrunner” in May before taking over from Jeff Zucker. “The Late Show.”
“He would stand right over there and hit the applause sign before we went to commercial — basically all his job was. Now he has a really hard job, running CNN,” Colbert stated. “The word on the street is you guys aren’t allowed to be liberal anymore. Is that the case?”
“I don’t think we ever were liberal,” Lemon responded.
“What?” Colbert stated. “That’s not me saying that, that’s the people out there saying he’s not letting you be liberal anymore.”
Lemon indicated that he believed Licht wanted the network to be welcoming “sensible Republicans” “hold people to account” While making sure they feel at ease.
“If you invite someone in your house, you want to make them feel comfortable, but also, by the nature of what we do, we have to hold people to account,” He explained. “That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to be liberal or conservative or whatever. It just means we are doing what we do – and that’s good journalism.”
He stressed however that sometimes, it is necessary to confront people in order to hold them accountable.
“Listen, I have confrontational conversations with people I love and I have uncomfortable conversations with people that I love and I think it’s necessary. And I think it’s also necessary to do that on CNN,” Lemon continues. “But you can do that without being vitriolic. I think not being vitriolic is a better way of putting it. You can do that and not have vitriol. As people say, you can disagree without being disagreeable. That’s what our mission is.”
In addition to Lemon moving from his previous primetime slot, CNN’s Brian Stelter, Jeffrey Toobin and John Harwood have all exited the network.
The full video is available here “Late Show” You can see the segment below.
