“I had to get rid of a lot of people in my life,” Don Lemon, who dropped some of his friends over their support for Trump, told fellow CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.
By Paul Shindman, World Israel News
Fox News attacked arch-rival CNN Friday, accusing the network of sinking to a new low in its election coverage by likening supporters of President Donald Trump to drug addicts.
Fox news media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn went after CNN’s Don Lemon after the CNN anchor said he dropped some of his own friends because they had gone “too far” in supporting the president.
“I had to get rid of them because they’re too far gone,” Lemon told fellow CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. “I had to get rid of a lot of people in my life because sometimes you’ve just got to let them go. I think they have to hit rock bottom like an addict, right? … at a certain point, you just say they’re too far gone and I’ve got to let them go.”
Lemon, Cuomo and other CNN anchors make no bones about their anti-Trump stance and support for the campaign of Democratic candidate Joe Biden, while Fox anchors are decidedly pushing for a Trump victory in next week’s election and are unabashedly anti-Biden.
To an outside observer, the presidential election battle between FOX and CNN has little to do with objective journalism. The news website Business Insider noted earlier this year that a decade ago “American media became more politically aligned, it wasn’t enough.”
Mike Hoyt, a former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, said actual news reporting at Fox was “a small island in a vast sea of very conservative commentary.” After CNN reported its worst business year in 2012, the network struggled to find a recipe to bring back and keep viewers, reaching a point where BI reported that “CNN was no longer defining itself by sitting in the middle of the political spectrum.”
“In this current election campaign, Fox and CNN have rallied against each other on a nightly basis for ratings,” John O’Donovan, a journalism lecturer at the School of Communications at Dublin City University, said Thursday.
“Although network operators are competing for viewers on their platforms … it is Fox News and CNN that are, in essence, in a battle against each other,” O’Donovan wrote on the RTE news website.
“Fox [journalists] advocate for Trump through the monologues and editorializing of prime-time anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Over on CNN, there is a similar approach with anchors Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon pushing Joe Biden’s cause,” O’Donavan said.
“They are quite unapologetic in this and make it quite clear their distrust and dislike of Trump or Biden,” he noted.