CNN's Don Lemon Denies Media Is 'Complicit' In Trump 'Getting To Become President'

June 24th, 2016 2:30 PM

CNN host Don Lemon has been offering denials recently that the media has any effect on anything, and can never be blamed for anything that happens. Josh Feldman at Mediaite offered a new one, a Lemon satellite-radio interview with Muslim activist/comedian Dean Obeidallah, where he denied the media could be blamed for Donald Trump’s campaign success so far.

Obeidallah asked Lemon to react to the commonly held notion that the media began by glomming on to the Trump phenomenon because “This a great ride for, it’s a ratings boon, so we don’t want to challenge him too much because we might lose access.”

Lemon started with the acknowledgment of reality: “Let’s be honest.Yes, Donald Trump is good for ratings. There’s a reason why he was on The Apprentice. There’s a reason why The Apprentice was a number-one show. And there was also a reason why the media put him on, because we hadn’t seen anything like him. He said outlandish things, yes we know, thus we’re going to cover it. But I don’t think the media is complicit in getting Donald Trump to, you know, getting him to become president.”

Then he turned to blame...the other Republican candidates for not granting enough access!

LEMON: I also think they were putting him on because he accepted the interviews. And there were other candidates we would have loved to have gotten on, and they would not accept our invitation to come on television. They realized too late that, ‘oh wait, maybe we should be coming on television,’ and they started accepting invitations toward the end, but by then it was too late. Donald Trump had hijacked the media, and had hijacked the spotlight and the narrative.

So wait, Trump “hijacked” the media spotlight, and the media could not be blamed, because they were as helpless as Fay Wray in a King Kong flick? Lemon singled out Marco Rubio as failing to realize he needed to be Trump-ier and take more interviews and be more brash and bullying in tone:

LEMON: And I’ve said it from the beginning, and I may have said it on your show to you, that I always believed in Donald Trump, that he would have an impact on this race because he’s a New Yorker. He’s used to the shark-infested media waters of New York City. And if you know if you can do that, then you’re well on your way, if you can garner all the free media, unearned media, whatever, or earned media, as they put it, then he’s good. So he can do that.

So I don’t really blame the media as much as I blame – although we are, you know, we have some responsibility – as much as I blame the other candidates who didn’t realize they weren’t in a traditional campaign any more, and stuck with the traditional way of doing things. If Marco Rubio had gotten out there earlier, and not saying he had to do it, but in the end, he did it, and hit Donald Trump in the nose like a bully, and took over the media narrative, that he may have still been in the race, but he didn’t do it, so I think many people only have themselves to blame.  I think the media is a business, just like anything else, it’s a news business, and so there you go!

So at the end, he's suggesting you can't blame the media for promoting Trump because the news media is a business....which ends up just underlining how Obeidallah began this segment, by noting the media helped make Trump because Trump helped the media's bottom line.

And then there's the other half of the accusation which didn't come up: that they helped Trump to make it easier for Hillary to get elected.