Uncle Don Lemon in Hot Water

In the above clip, CNN's Sunny Hostin and Don Lemon disagreed over what actually took place when a deranged cop manhandled the teenager refusing to get up from her seat. Will Lemon be fired? Should he? Benjamin Dixon went on the Dr. Boyce Watkins Show to discuss this current event.

Of course Lemon should be fired. Though will he? Fareed Zakaria and Brian Williams weren't fired for plagiarism and other unprofessional conduct. I remember Imus perhaps getting canned back in the day, but that memory is foggy. I don't imagine a right winger like Lemon is in any authentic hot water. I agree with Watkins that the bottom line for these networks is ratings and that perhaps Lemon is the Black man's version of a Bill O'Reilly.

Sunny Hostin should quit that network. She is often on as the counter mouth to sleazebag ex-cop Harry Houck. I am done with CNN. I've been done with them for quite a while. When I need a cable news fix, I now go to MSNBC. And they are nothing special either, but at least they are to the left of CNN.

Herbert Marcuse explained in Repressive Tolerance how the media props up the status quo.

Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.

That gets to the crux of how the media props up the status quo. Both sides are always to be presented no matter how ridiculous. And here's one more excerpt:

UNDER the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent. The progressive historical force of tolerance lies in its extension to those modes and forms of dissent which are not committed to the status quo of society, and not confined to the institutional framework of the established society. Consequently, the idea of tolerance implies the necessity, for the dissenting group or individuals, to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent. This would be the case not only in a totalitarian society, under a dictatorship, in one-party states, but also in a democracy (representative, parliamentary, or 'direct') where the majority does not result from the development of independent thought and opinion but rather from the monopolistic or oligopolistic administration of public opinion, without terror and (normally) without censorship. In such cases, the majority is self-perpetuating while perpetuating the vested interests which made it a majority. In its very structure this majority is 'closed', petrified; it repels a priori any change other than changes within the system. But this means that the majority is no longer justified in claiming the democratic title of the best guardian of the common interest. And such a majority is all but the opposite of Rousseau's 'general will': it is composed, not of individuals who, in their political functions, have made effective 'abstraction' from their private interests, but, on the contrary, of individuals who have effectively identified their private interests with their political functions. And the representatives of this majority, in ascertaining and executing its will, ascertain and execute the will of the vested interests, which have formed the majority. The ideology of democracy hides its lack of substance.

     In the United States, this tendency goes hand in hand with the monopolistic or oligopolistic concentration of capital in the formation of public opinion, i.e., of the majority. The chance of influencing, in any effective way, this majority is at a price, in dollars, totally out of reach of the radical opposition. Here too, free competition and exchange of ideas have become a farce. The Left has no equal voice, no equal access to the mass media and their public facilities - not because a conspiracy excludes it, but because, in good old capitalist fashion, it does not have the required purchasing power. And the Left does not have the purchasing power because it is the Left. These conditions impose upon the radical minorities a strategy which is in essence a refusal to allow the continuous functioning of allegedly indiscriminate but in fact discriminate tolerance, for example, a strategy of protesting against the alternate matching of a spokesman for the Right (or Center) with one for the Left. Not 'equal' but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality.

There you have it. Go up and down the CNN roster and look at the top of their list. They are excessively to the right and it's not just about Don Lemon. They do not mirror the society at large. They are folks who have been indoctrinated and who pass such qualities onto the passive listener objects who follow them.

Don Lemon is clearly a piece of shit Uncle Tom. There is no tolerance for the woman in the background who might actually have the majority opinion. Don Lemon might as well be a white man, same as Clarence Thomas or you name the Uncle Tom.