Close Read: Don Lemon’s Firing Announcement

"I don’t know who else to text 'Don Lemon purple font' to"

Don Lemon in Jeremy Strong core — all brown everything — at the Michael Kors Collection Fall/Winter 2023 Runway Show in New York City. (Photo: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images)

The very day after Succession aired an episode titled “Kill List,” the top bosses at Fox News and CNN released their own kill lists (stan behavior). Fox dismissed Tucker Carlson without even giving him the courtesy of a farewell show; the newly super centrist CNN had an announcement up its statement sleeve, too. Don Lemon, the channel’s morning news co-anchor, was being shown the door. Lemon announced the news himself, via a terse, brief statement: “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN. I am stunned.” the ex-anchor wrote.

Source.

It’s less what he said but how he said it: Lemon didn’t wait for a press release or to send his statement directly to media reporters. It wasn’t written in the Notes app, nor did it feature any kind of apology. (This is like when Cardi B announced she and Offset were divorcing and Offset simply commented “Yall won.”) He released it raw, and in purple. Here are some elements we need to consider:

The timing: Lemon’s tweet came after Tucker Carlson’s firing — meaning he knew when he pressed send that he’d be the second most shocking firing of the day, an L if I’ve ever seen one — but more importantly just a few hours after he’d waved goodbye on what became his final appearance on CNN This Morning. I will never recover from the knowledge that they let this man cut his weekend short to get up at 3 AM on a Monday morning only to fire him Monday afternoon. He could’ve taken the weekend into his new life as a free agent. They really made him clock in…