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“The First Amendment in the United States protects journalists who bear witness to news and events as they unfold, ensuring they can report freely in the public interest, and the DOJ’s attempts to violate those rights is unacceptable.”
That was CNN‘s statement following the arrest of Don Lemon, an anchor the network fired not long ago after 17 years at the company.
“The First Amendment is under attack in America!” added former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, who suffered a similar fate to Lemon at the network last year.
“Don Lemon is an accomplished journalist whose urgent work is protected by the First Amendment. There is zero basis to arrest him,” House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said. “He should be freed immediately.”
It is truly a sight to behold, purported news networks, fellow “journalists,” and a leader of the Democratic Party casting the cheesy performance artist-turned-activist Don Lemon as the second coming of Bernard Shaw.
But here’s where we are, with some in the community — mostly those ousted from the legacy media jobs — actually defending Lemon storming a church in Minneapolis, which was a blatant attack on the right to worship protected under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. And no, Lemon wasn’t just a reporter covering a story. He brought donuts and coffee for the mob beforehand. He admitted to knowing what was about to unfold beforehand. He kissed the lead organizer after a sycophantic interview moments beforehand. He lectured the pastor, who politely asked Lemon and the agitators to leave, about the First Amendment.
That’s not journalism.
Fast-forward to this week and the mass layoffs announced at the Washington Post. Overall, more than one-third of staff were handed pink slips in what is the biggest single-day purge of any major news publication in history.
So why did this happen? For the same reason that Stephen Colbert is going off the air on CBS in May: a loss in profits. The Post is losing the amount of money no business, even one owned by Jeff Bezos, can tolerate — an annual loss of $100 million due to falling interest from readers and therefore subscribers. Colbert reportedly also lost $40 million per year for the network, as his ratings aren’t bringing in the kind of ad revenue to support such an expensive program.
It’s simple math in both cases. But because the Post is a sympathetic publication toward the Democratic Party, to put it lightly, and because Colbert is downright sycophantic to the same party, both failures are being portrayed as somehow being orchestrated by President Donald Trump to squash the First Amendment, with Bezos allegedly there to carry out the execution.
“Jeff Bezos, who could keep the Washington Post a pillar of American democracy with the change dug out from his limousine seats, sets an example of surrender to authoritarianism for every other business person and institution in America,” New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof said.
Strong, snarky stuff there.
In a related story, Kristof talks about the Post being a “pillar of American democracy” as if it’s an objective publication that holds the powerful accountable without fear or favor to a party. Yet this is the same guy who decided to run for governor of Oregon back in 2022 as a Democrat — Kristof was taken off the ballot after the state Supreme Court ruled he didn’t meet residency requirements.
“Even if the losses are still around $100 million a year, the figure announced a couple of years ago, for a person of Bezos’ wealth, that would mean he’d have to close the place in … 2,500 years,” argued former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. “I don’t think the layoffs have much to do with saving money.”
Yep, Jeff Bezos got to where he was by burning money in the street in the name of charity, which is the implication here: Bezos should just take $1 billion in losses over a decade because he can afford to do so. Good luck with that argument.
CNN’s Brian Stelter also predictably jumped in to question Bezos’s “motive” over raw data: “Bezos was seen earlier this week with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a space event. Bezos has been focused on his relationships with the Trump administration. And many ‘Post‘ staffers feel they are the victims of that kind of attempt to curry favor and cozy up to the Trump administration.”
Why on Earth would Bezos attend a space event with a Trump Cabinet member? Could it be, just spitballing here, that Bezos has a space company he’s invested in called Blue Origin?
By the way, it was in 2023 at a time when X was having trouble retaining advertisers after Elon Musk purchased the site, when Stelter argued that if the company went under, well, “that’s the free market,” deciding.
Yep. Same guy.
As for all of these Post staffers who feel they are the victims here, could even one explain why it’s OK to lose so many readers and so much money that they should keep their jobs in perpetuity?
And it is unintentionally hilarious to see those who are screaming about the need to protect the First Amendment were the same people who fully supported Trump’s ban from X, Facebook, and countless other social media platforms. Rules for thee, not for D’s — as in Democrats.
Trevor Noah in 2021: “I get why Facebook extended Trump’s suspension. But you have to admit, it does seem pretty unfair to ban him from a website that began as a way to rate women’s looks.”
Jimmy Kimmel, the guy who repeatedly cries on the air about his First Amendment rights being taken away: “Trump has been suspended from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even Snapchat, but don’t worry, Mr. President, there are still plenty of apps you do have access to. You still have Spotify to drown out the sound of millions of people cheering as you leave.”
Seth Meyers in 2021: “I love having Donald Trump off Twitter, not to mention all the other toxic racists and conspiracy theorists who have been booted off.”
James Corden in 2021: “Banning Trump was like one of the few almost good things Twitter has done in like a decade. Donald Trump is a scam account — it’s all a scam.”
But now these same folks are lamenting the fall of the Post while attempting to turn Don Lemon into the Rosa Parks of journalism.
Kimmel this week: Don Lemon “was arrested for committing journalism, which is a very serious crime under our current administration.”
Colbert this week on the Post layoffs: “We’re losing a pillar of journalism in the middle of a constitutional crisis,” adding that the decision is “the worst decision Bezos has ever made.” The millions being lost per month weren’t mentioned by Colbert for whatever reason.
This week, Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, and Mehdi Hasan, with the latter two fired by MS Now, got together to discuss how free speech is under attack in the United States under Trump. But Acosta immediately jumped to censorship in one of the most ironic statements one could make under the circumstances regarding CNN contributor Scott Jennings, a Republican: “If Scott Jennings worked for me, I’d fire his ass. I would not want him on my show or my network.”
MR. TRUMP, TEAR DOWN THE KENNEDY CENTER
Wow … talk about tolerance and the embrace of an open exchange of ideas.
Lemon, rightly, was arrested.
The Post rightly laid off staffers as the paper hemorrhages millions.
They all cheered when a sitting president was banned from most social media.
“Hypocrisy demonstrates how unaccountable one is to conventional morality,” investigative reporter Michael Shellenberger once said.
Conventional morality, at least in a dying legacy media industry, has never been needed more now than ever.