This reporting is featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media.
Former CNN star Don Lemon may return to your screen very soon—albeit not the cable-news ones he’s used to. The famously outspoken news anchor is attempting to mount a comeback, Confider has learned, and is in talks to host a program on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
(UPDATE: Lemon on Tuesday afternoon confirmed Confider’s reporting, announcing in a tweet that he will stream a new show on X. “Today I am back bigger, bolder, freer! My new media company’s first project is The Don Lemon Show,” he wrote. “It will be available to everyone, easily, whenever and wherever you want it, streaming on the platforms where the conversations are happening. And you'll find it first on X, the biggest space for free speech in the world.”)
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Lemon’s downfall was one of 2023’s biggest falls from grace. Once the darling of CNN, he was unceremoniously fired (over the phone!) by the network he’d been a face of for more than a decade. Since then, he’s reappeared in the media via interviews expressing “vindication” over Chris Licht’s ouster as CNN CEO and a few spotteds in the Hamptons.
However, he’s been quite active on Twitter, including a recent post weighing in on Nikki Haley’s Civil War debacle by invoking his own scandalous past remarks about her that led to his ouster.
If Lemon inks a deal with Elon Musk’s husk of a social-media platform, it would mean following in the footsteps of last year’s other big media loser, Tucker Carlson, who was fired by Fox the same day Lemon got whacked. (Funnily enough, Musk floated the idea of Lemon hosting an X show just a few weeks after the firing.) Both cable-news exiles are represented by pitbull entertainment lawyer Bryan Freedman.
No word yet on whether Lemon’s X show would be an interview-based program like Carlson’s but if it is, we hope he can give the former Fox star a run for his money with the quality of his bookings. Carlson’s sit-downs for Tucker on X have thus far included the likes of Ice Cube, Kid Rock, conspiracy loon Alex Jones, alleged rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate, and our personal favorite, Larry Sinclair, a convicted con man wielding discredited claims of crack-fueled sexual liaisons with Barack Obama. A real murderers’ row of mensches.
Neither Lemon nor his reps responded to multiple requests for comment.
