A Tale of Two Commentators

Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon both get their walking papers on the same day. Do the similarities start—or end—there?

A good friend texted me the other day.

”Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon fired on the same day. This is The Law of Equivalent Exchange,” he wrote.

I chuckled. It was a pithy comment, to be sure, and I always appreciate a good alchemy reference (especially of the Fullmetal variety). However, the jocular observation got me thinking: Is that true? Are Tucker and Don “equivalent?”

The case for their equivalence would likely begin with the basic notion, commonly held, that modern American politics has two major factions, a Left and a Right, each with their respective media mouthpieces who spew forth their particular party’s pabulum. On April 24th, we lost one from the Left in CNN’s Don Lemon and one from the Right in FOX’s Tucker Carlson. On the surface—and I suppose even below that depending on your political perspective—it seems fair enough. Don and Tucker are both vociferous, well-known political commentators. They appear on major, “rival” networks that ostensibly cater to opposing political ideologies. It seems like an equivalent exchange so far.

One may even call to mind the fearful symmetry of the separate Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Tucker Carlson (FOX) court rulings both declaring that their audiences knew they were presenting “opinion and exaggeration,” not facts.

Surely, the dueling departures of Tucker and Don is one more example of this curious cosmic balance, right?

Well, not so fast. I actually contend it is the opposite. In reality, Tucker and Don could not be more different, and this “exchange” is the furthest thing from “equivalent.”

---

Exhibit A: Success

Tucker and Don were not even in the same galaxy with regard to viewership. Tucker’s numbers dominated Don’s. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” airing weeknights at 8 p.m., began when Tucker took over that coveted timeslot from the infamous falafelphiliac Bill O’Reilly way back on April 24, 2017. (Tucker was let go on his TV anniversary!?) Tucker’s show was a perpetual powerhouse, and in the first quarter of 2023, for example, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was the single most watched cable news program, viewed by an average of 3.251 million viewers.

By comparison, Don Lemon had wallowed in the ratings version of the Sarlaac Pit, where he (and his dozens of viewers) found “a new definition of pain and suffering” as his ratings were slowly digested over the years. From 2014 until last year, Don had been parked at the weeknight 10 p.m. timeslot as host of “CNN Tonight/Don Lemon Tonight.” By September of 2022, Lemon was averaging a meager 584,000 viewers to finish a distant third to rivals Fox and MSNBC. These abysmal ratings likely spurred his relocation to a morning show, “CNN This Morning,” in November of that year. (Ah, how I’m sure Don and CNN yearned for the halcyon days of 2020, when wild-eyed rantings about Reichstag 2.0 “The January 6th Insurrection!” had Don getting Tucker-esque numbers back on “CNN Tonight.”)

“CNN This Morning,” in turn, stumbled out the gate, and somehow still managed to go down from there. Earlier this year, “the show earned its lowest ratings since the show began, averaging 331,000 viewers. Meanwhile, its competitors ‘Fox & Friends’ and MSNBC’s 'Morning Joe’ drew nearly 1 million and 760,000 viewers apiece across the same time period,” according to The Independent.

Over in the streaming space, Tucker’s documentaries, “Tucker Carlson Originals,” remain standout successes driving subscriptions to FOX Nation. Don’s doomed “The Don Lemon Show” managed two episodes before the entire service imploded after a single month of hilarious futility.

Furthermore, Tucker’s departure appears to have immediately wiped out around 800-million dollars of market value from FOX overnight, even if there was a subsequent rebound. It may be unfair to point out that there was no equivalent devastation following Don’s departure from CNN seeing as how I’m pretty sure CNN already has zero dollars worth of market value, but I’ll note the contrast nonetheless.

In terms of success, Tucker and Don are vastly different.

---

Exhibit B: Content

Content is king, and when it came to content, Carlson reigned supreme. And I am not just referring to the ability to make headlines—both men had the ability to do that in their own ways—I am saying the quality and value of Tucker’s content was lightyears beyond Don’s.

To best understand this point, I entreat you to watch this excellent video from Glenn Greenwald clearly showing why Tucker Carlson was “the most dissident voice on cable.” Go ahead, watch it now. You can come back and finish reading this afterward…

…

…

OK! You are either back, or you took a raincheck on the video. Either way, no worries; I’ll try to catch you up to speed.

Tucker was the single best—and most important—voice in all of mainstream news.

For some, that may seem like damning with faint praise, and they’re not entirely wrong. For his detractors though, that proclamation generates such shock, such palpable rage and disgust, that it is a sight to behold. Why? Sure, some people may find his delivery grating or his mannerisms absurd. Fair enough. He can sound a bit like a rubber chicken, and his face does seem to be stuck in a scrunched state of confused disagreement.

But, why do so many of his detractors have such a visceral hatred for Tucker?

Sure, if you are some pompous Pentagon warpig; googly-eyed tyrant; or jealous, no-talent hack spewing authoritarian agitprop for cash and clapter, then I can see the rationale. But, what about people who say they oppose those things? Have they actually watched multiple episodes of Tucker’s show, or are they just buying into the narrative that—like Trump, and now Elon—Tucker is an evil, fascist, patriarchal, omniphobic grand poohbah of the Nazi KKK? This is a complex question, the underlying phenomena of which I hope to explicate in greater detail in a subsequent article.

For now, let’s just focus on Tucker’s virtues. To do this, let’s rewind all the way back to the beginning of this article. To contend that Tucker and Don were “equivalent” in terms of content, you’d have to plug them into that “Left/Right” framework I posited. The problem is Tucker does not fit neatly into that framework. Tucker was an intrepid and courageous voice in the cable news wilderness, willing to challenge even the Republican and Right Wing orthodoxy on a variety of sacrosanct topics: he opposed our involvement in foreign wars; he criticized vulture capitalism; he exposed the corruption of Big Pharma; the man platformed and supported union leaders, for Christ’s sake, think of the children!

Remember when those would all be considered liberal Democrat policies? It would seem people like Democrat House Member Ro Khanna does; he praised Tucker’s critique of interventionism back in 2019. These were not mainline Republican views, but Tucker dared to explore them regardless. He seemed to be operating based largely on his journalistic and populist principles, even though it often got him pilloried by all sides, and may indeed have contributed to the FOX corporate overlords finally cutting ties with him.

Again, I am just echoing the sentiment in the Glenn Greenwald piece linked above (Watch it!), but for whatever faults he had, Tucker still remained the lone, powerful voice in the mainstream media with the audacity to challenge party narratives, defend individual liberty, and speak directly to the misery and misgivings of the mocked and maligned masses.

Don Lemon was nothing more than another mouthpiece for the Neolib monolith. Legend has it he once had his own ideas, but he seems to have learned quickly enough to fall in line and never make that mistake again. Ever since that fateful day, he has remained unwaveringly dedicated to delivering homogenized Democrat talking points with his trademark glassy-eyed stare, despite risible attempts to claim otherwise. Day in and day out for years, he sedulously contributed to CNN’s 24-hour loop of Two Minutes Hate. For every supposed dog whistle lurking imperceptibly just beneath one of Tucker’s monologues there was a Don Lemon bullhorn blaring out division, hate, madness, tyranny, and lies.

Whether Don was promoting CNN’s infamous “fiery but mostly peaceful riots,” advocating for Draconian “vaccine” mandates, or clamoring for greater dystopian, surveillance state censorship, he spent his entire CNN career parroting the pernicious party line. He offered nothing of value to his audience, and they are all now dumber for having listened to him.

Though it was far from Don’s greatest sin objectively, personally, I was particularly put off by his revolting interview with Terry Crews during the 2020 Summer of Love, where Don condescendingly browbeat TERRY CREWS OF ALL PEOPLE (possibly a perfect man and frontrunner for most wonderful human alive in my book) because a prescient Terry had the temerity to express some concerns about the direction and efficacy of BLM.

I know. I know. What did I expect? After all, Don is literally the man who solemnly stated, with a straight face, “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.” Yes, he really said that. Unironically.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the final straw for Lemon may have been the disastrous “debate” he had with Vivek Ramaswamy, which culminated in the sad spectacle of Don haplessly arguing with producers in his earpiece, insulting the GOP presidential hopeful, and then devolving into the usual Woke schtick of cowering behind identity politics and emotional appeals as Vivek relentlessly schooled him on American history, civil rights, and the 2nd Amendment.

”It’s insulting to me as an African American,” Lemon finally squealed. “I don’t want to sit here and argue with you because it’s infuriating for you to put those things together.”

Identity and emotion. What a perfect encapsulation of the modern Democrat platform. Tucker was willing to piss off much of his audience by criticizing Sydney Powell and her lack of evidence for Trump’s election fraud claims; Don dutifully regurgitated Biden’s vapid platitudes back into the addled brains of his ever-dwindling viewership.

In terms of quality of content, Tucker and Don are vastly different.

---

Exhibit C: Guests

Speaking of Don’s disastrous “debate” with Vivek, one final point to consider here is the topic of guests.

Clearly, Don would occasionally dare to host guests with differing opinions, but as evidenced by the aforementioned train wrecks with Crews and Ramaswamy, they invariably immediately degenerated into Lemon hectoring them, failing and flailing, and then cutting the interview in a huff. They made Jim Rome’s table-tossing interview of Jim Everett seem downright decorous.

Tucker Carlson, however, regularly had on guests from across the board, and this led to some engaging discussions. Of course, these exchanges weren’t always productive or cordial either, but the practice was noteworthy, and the results were worthwhile far more often.

Of note, Tucker provided a platform for a variety of Democrats, dissidents, progressives, independents, liberals, “Lefties,” and more, ranging from Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald to Jimmy Dore and Christian Smalls. In fact, his willingness to do so, and the manner in which he conducted these exchanges, garnered praise even from these apparent ideological adversaries, something you’ll never see happen with regard to Don Lemon. A depressing but fascinating footnote to this is found perusing the comments under Dore’s gracious tweets (linked above), where Woke lunatics rush to attack Dore for advocating policies they say they supposedly support because their a priori “TUCKER BAD!” programming overrides all.

In terms of how they handle guests, Tucker and Don are vastly different.

---

Many people will find a certain parity in the similarly timed terminations of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon from their respective cable news juggernauts. However, judge them by their success, their content, and the discussions they facilitated, and the two were worlds apart. Tucker chiseled out a unique and valuable niche as the rare gadfly in the mainstream media ointment, while Don sacrificed a once-promising career to serve as little more than an obsequious, expedient mouthpiece for a malevolent ideology.

Tucker Carlson has come a long way since his bowtied battle with Jon Stewart. He has built an enormous audience of people who respect his work and will follow him wherever he chooses to go next. And it is his choice. He will be fine. In fact, the delusional Wokesters would do well to temper their “deplatforming” celebrations, as I’d wager that Tucker, now liberated from the shackles of legacy media, shall grow even stronger from this ordeal.

Don Lemon, meanwhile, has become a babbling parody of a reporter. And now, an irrelevant afterthought. The best he can hope for is to cling to fringe relevance for as long as his tenuous grasp will hold. In that way, the closest equivalent to Don is indeed not Tucker at all, but his fellow discarded CNN chaff Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter, who are currently consumed with that same desperate struggle.