A former “60 Minutes” correspondent slammed CNN anchors Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, joining the growing host of media critics who wondered whether the pair are journalists or “opinion hosts.”
“My concern as a journalist is trying to figure out what the facts are and trying to figure out what people are actually representing and what they’re trying to do in the election,” Lara Logan said during an appearance on Fox News’s “Hannity” on April 3.
“As journalists, it seems to me, our job is to do that. That is our duty. But what I really want to know, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, are they opinion hosts? Are these opinion shows or news programs?”
Logan said that people tell her they want “the facts” when they turn on news programs.
Unlike “Hannity,” which is clearly an opinion-based show, the shows hosted by Lemon and Cuomo are presented as news but are full of opinion, Logan noted.
“The problem with what has been happening in the media as far as I’m concerned is that we claim the middle ground. We claim to be objective and we are not,” she said.
Cuomo, the brother of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat and vocal critic of President Donald Trump, often goes on rants during his show voicing his opinions on a range of matters, such as the time he defended the far-left, communist-rooted group Antifa.
In another riff, Cuomo claimed that it was clear that Trump “is not about compassion.”
Lemon, meanwhile, often denigrates entire groups of people, such as saying during an appearance in October 2018 that white men are the “biggest terror threat” in the United States.
Falsely labeling a travel ban on countries that can’t suppress terrorism as a “Muslim ban,” Lemon said: “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.”
“There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on—you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban,” he added.
Neither Lemon nor CNN apologized for his comments.
The criticism of CNN came as the network continued to fall in ratings, along with MSNBC. Both networks are also openly liberal and almost exclusively air stories that are negative about Republicans and Trump.
The ratings for Fox, meanwhile, jumped after the submission of a report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that could not establish any collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
