CNN To Sober Up

As 2022 goes out, so too will a recent holiday tradition: During CNN’s broadcast of various New Year’s Eve celebrations, Don Lemon probably won’t be downing shots on camera, reports Variety.

The Warner Bros. Discovery-backed news outlet wants to pare back some of the zany antics that have become a staple of its wee-hours coverage of the last night of the year. While Anderson Cooper will still be able to imbibe during primetime hours — along with his co-host Andy Cohen — while the duo holds forth in Times Square, correspondents and anchors who may have slurped down alcoholic concoctions on camera (or off) in the past will be required to halt the practice.

Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper

The network’s coverage of New Year’s Eve was a topic of a town-hall discussion held Tuesday between CNN staffers and Chris Licht, the company’s chairman and CEO, according to people familiar with the meeting. The coming New Year’s Eve broadcast will be CNN’s first under Licht’s aegis.  During the event, Licht told employees he felt on-camera drinking eroded the credibility of CNN personnel and damaged the “respectability” they may enjoy among viewers. CNN declined to make executives available for comment.

CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage isn’t the most watched thing on TV that night — Ryan Seacrest’s ABC program typically wins bigger TV crowds — but it has become a part of the holiday., Cooper has held his New Year’s Eve duties longer than the ABC host and has been an auld lang syne fixture since 2002, driven initially to embrace the idea by his own ambivalence about the occasion.