CNN, Don Lemon On Collision Course

“CNN This Morning” host Don Lemon went on an unscripted rant against the New York Post on Tuesday after the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee called the paper “credible” over its Hunter Biden laptop scoops during an interview with Kaitlan Collins – the co-anchor Lemon allegedly berated, as The NY Post reported last week. 

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) discussed the upcoming House probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop and suggestions from the Twitter Files that the FBI targeted stories related to the suppression of The Post’s Biden laptop coverage.  Comer accused the FBI of pushing to ban The Post, calling the paper a “credible outlet” and the fourth biggest newspaper in America.” Most mainstream media outlets, including CNN, slammed The Post’s laptop bombshell before Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. 

After Collins – who conducted the interview from Capitol Hill – threw it back to the New York studio, Lemon turned sour. “That’s the time that we’re in, where facts are sort of flexible and you just throw things out there -– citing uncredible sources, like citing the New York Post as a credible source and saying that facts are – it’s just, I can’t believe that we’re here,” Lemon said.

Lemon’s other co-host Poppy Harlow, who was on set, interrupted the diatribe in an attempt to smooth things over. “That’s why we’ve got Kaitlan Collins on the Hill, fact-checking in real time. It was a great interview,” she said.

Harlow congratulated Collins, who was in D.C. to cover Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, before bluntly saying: “Alright, moving on!”

Music began to play so the show could cut to commercial, but Lemon persisted and refused to be played off stage.

“Hold on please with the music,” he blared.

“American people are going to have to suffer through all of this stuff from election deniers to people who don’t believe in facts, we don’t have a shared reality. And now it has taken center stage,” Lemon said, referring to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who also sits on the Oversight Committee.

Lemon’s outburst comes days after The Post revealed he allegedly reamed out Collins for interrupting him on a Dec. 8 broadcast, which ended in higher-ups allegedly telling Lemon to take a personal timeout the following day. Since then, the pair have hardly been on set together.

It also follows a directive by new CNN boss Chris Licht to steer away from the left-leaning opinionated coverage that has sunk the network in the ratings. Last month, Lichttold the Los Angeles Times his third-place cable news network will no longer be home to “partisan hackery” and “ideological talking points.”