Hey everyone. Not what you think. I’m not leaving CNN. Tune in for the handoff on Monday at 10pE and I’ll explain. pic.twitter.com/oOwDferY2i
— Don Lemon (@donlemon) May 15, 2021
Okay. That's what I got from clicking on the Twitter sidebar. Here's the NY Post article on the subject:
Lemon shocked viewers by ending his news show Friday with... “It’s been really, really great. This is the last night that will be ‘CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.'” he said. “So, I appreciate all the years of ‘CNN Tonight with Don Lemon,’ but changes are coming, and I will fill you in.”
No NYT article yet, but I see something there from a month ago: "CNN Is in a Post-Trump Slump. What Does That Mean for Don Lemon?/The prime-time host on the future of cable news, the urgency of conversations about race and whether CNN is a boys’ club." It's a podcast interview. Excerpt:
kara swisher Yeah. I want to talk about CNN and the future of the network and cable in general. Because I’ve had Jason Kilar on, the head of Warner, so your boss’s boss. And he talked about making —
don lemon He’s my boss. Nice guy.
kara swisher I’m sorry? Yeah, he is.
don lemon And very handsome, by the way.
kara swisher He’s a very handsome man.
don lemon I know that’s weird, that’s going to be weird. [LAUGHTER]
kara swisher Said a very handsome man about a very handsome man.
don lemon I said who is — This is our new boss, hm, interesting.
kara swisher O.K. All right, let’s move along. I’m going to get you out of the jam here.
don lemon That’s gonna get me in trouble.
kara swisher It is indeed. I’m going to move you out of a jam before you move along further. All right. There are a number of threats to the business. He and I talked about it a lot. Declining ratings, changing of the guard, diversity challenges. So now that Trump’s out of the White House, cable news viewership all over has been down. Fox’s particularly — prime-time viewership 32 percent from the last quarter. CNN has done better. Still lost 16 percent of prime-time viewers. So are you worried about — Trump always said, “I’m good for cable.” And so cable, people who run cable. Are you worried about the viewership fizzle? So what does it mean you have to do now?
don lemon No. I’m not worried about it. I just keep doing what I do. I’ve always been nimble and malleable and whatever comes next I’ll be ready for it. The reason I’m not worried about it is because it beats the alternative. The alternative of him being in there and us having to figure out how we deal with lies, and bigotry, and hate, and the toxicity that was the Trump administration. Which has nothing for me to do with my ideology or politics. Because people have accused me of being conservative. It has nothing to do with politics. Trump was a horrible person. And he was terrible for the country. And it is better for all — for the world that he is no longer the President of the United States. So if that means that cable news ratings go down? Aww. So I’m not really that concerned about it. I would prefer that my ratings go down and Trump not be in office than my ratings be sky-high and him be there. That’s the honest truth.
I had to look up what was going on with Lemon's ratings. Ah, I see, it's his show that is getting challenged by Fox's new Greg Gutfeld show. In the ratings that came out yesterday, Greg leads in his hour with 409,000 and Lemon has 206,000 in the 25-54 demographic and 1,771,000 to 697,000 for total viewers.
ADDED: "I’ve always been nimble and malleable...." He means nimble and flexible or adaptable. That's the trouble with displaying a big vocabulary. You have to know the shades of meaning. At least he didn't say "manipulable."
The root of "malleable" is the same as the root of "mallet." We're talking about susceptibility to hammering and to maintaining the hammered-into shape after the hammerer is finished. From Etymonline:
late 14c., "capable of being shaped or extended by hammering or rolling," from Old French malleable and directly from Medieval Latin malleabilis, from malleare "to beat with a hammer," from Latin malleus "hammer" (from PIE root *mele- "to crush, grind"). Figurative sense, of persons, "capable of being adapted by outside influence" is recorded from 1610s.
Clearly, it's not a good brag to call yourself "malleable"! You want to be the hammer wielder, not the hammered one. Here's the non-figurative concept:
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1 comment:
R.T. O'Dactyl writes:
""Malleable" brings to mid the old adage -- used by many, including Longfellow and Goethe -- that in this world, "one must be either hammer or anvil." But George Orwell pointed out that "The anvil nearly always breaks the hammer.""
But the malleable thing is not the anvil, but the metal that can be shaped using a hammer. That's never going to break the hammer. The anvil was from the start designed to be even stronger than the hammer. It never changes its shape. And the hammer is working WITH the anvil. Those 2 are a team. It's the metal in between that is malleable, and the adage is just wrong, because if you are malleable person, you're neither the hammer or the anvil. You're the shapeable material, and, moreover, you HOLD your shape after you've been shaped.
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