The unanimously Trump-bashing PBS pundit show Washington Week with The Atlantic came rushing to the defense of Don Lemon on their Friday night pitch-and-catch. Host Jeffrey Goldberg began: “It's been another semi-hallucinatory week in America. Just yesterday, the former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested for covering a protest inside a church in Minneapolis.”
"Arrested for covering a protest" is exactly the DNC talking point of the week. Jeff and his Biden-boosting panel never cared one whit about this concept when Steve Baker of The Blaze was arrested for accompanying January 6 protesters -- in March of 2024, more than three years after the riot. Jeff didn't care when the FBI raided right-wing journalist James O'Keefe in search of the stolen diary of the president's daughter Ashley in 2021. There are other debater points. No conservative journalist ever appears to offer an actual counterpoint to Team Goldberg. The PBS mission is to offer the arguments of only one side. The unity is just so....comfortably undemocratic.
Susan Glasser of The New Yorker repeated the DNC line: "One of the things that they're accusing Don Lemon of doing is peppering the pastor with questions. That is called doing journalism. They have explicitly criminalized the act of journalism in their legal filing here." PBS eagerly tweeted out the talking point:
"This is the first time [President Trump] has ordered the arrest of a journalist," said @sbg1.
— Washington Week with The Atlantic | PBS (@washingtonweek) January 31, 2026
"One of the things that they're accusing Don Lemon of doing is peppering the pastor with questions. That is called doing journalism." pic.twitter.com/h2jVoGIuRh
Goldberg's employee Toluse Olorunnipa attempt to explain why the church-invading tactic was somehow necessary:
OLORUNNIPA: Don Lemon and a couple of other people were going in there filming and broadcasting what was happening. And, yes, you could say that going into a church might be seen as, you know, a little bit over the top or maybe uncouth for some people, but they wanted to show that they were going to go to do things that were different because of the way that this operation with 3,000 people going into a city taking kids away from preschools, separating families, this is something that's really disrupted their community, and so they want to do something different....Obviously, Don Lemon ended up getting arrested for the act of journalism, and that is something that we're watching.
GOLDBERG: It does strike me that invading a church during a service is not necessarily a good way to reach the middle of the country. It also strikes me that Don Lemon was there recording, playing a role as a journalist.
On 'Washington Week' on PBS, they all said Don Lemon was arrested on "manufactured charges" for "the act of journalism." They have only a tiny sliver of discomfort for leftists ending the right to Sunday worship. That part of the First Amendment? PBS pundits don't really care. pic.twitter.com/IYTfHgtb19
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) February 1, 2026
Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch was in full David Brooks Mode, giving PBS exactly the echo it's always seeking:
HAYES: I mean, this is what the president does. He did in his first term. He called journalists the enemy of American people. And he promised throughout his campaign that he would get retribution. I think that's what we're seeing. I don't think he's -- he's sort of guileless about it. It's not really like he's dressing it up much.
He said he wanted to get Don Lemon. Two federal judges said, there's not enough evidence, we're not going to do this. Apparently some of the prosecutors who were to have been involved, didn't want to be involved, and they went and got done limited anyway on basically manufactured charges.
Trump Haters can never find any "basically manufactured charges" against Trump over the last ten years, like the entire crusade that Trump had colluded with the Russians to get elected in 2016, not to mention many of the other partisan prosecutions.
