Don Lemon’s Response to School Desk Flip Sparks Outrage: ‘Are You Guys Kidding Me?’

Andrew HusbandOct 27th, 2015, 12:27 pm
 

Following Monday’s videos of a South Carolina school resource officer pummeling a female, African-American high school student, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tackled the subject head-on during The Situation Room. This led to a shouting match between Don Lemon and another panelist.

It all started when Blitzer initially gave the floor to CNN analyst Tom Fuentes and Lemon, who were both hesitant to totally assign blame to the officer for the videos’ disturbing footage. Lemon was especially unsure, saying “I don’t know.”

“It does look disturbing,” said the CNN anchor. “The part that is most disturbing to me is seeing her thrown around. As far as the desk going over, I don’t know if the desk fell over because she didn’t want to get up or if he pushed it over. I don’t know. I think there’s context to everything. I would like to see what happens before and I would like to see what happened afterwards… It does look horrible. It does look like there’s no excuse for what he’s doing to her, but again, we don’t know… This only show a small slice in time of what happened. I’d like to know more before passing judgment.”

Lemon’s comments seemed reasonable enough, but not to CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin. She exploded at the panel: “Are you guys kidding me?”

During the minute that followed, Lemon and Hostin took turns yelling at and interrupting one another.

“No, we’re not kidding. We don’t know what happened,” said Lemon. “You weren’t sitting in the room, Sunny. You don’t know if she wasn’t standing up!”

“I don’t need to know more,” Hostin retorted, to which Lemon said: “You do need to know more! As a prosecutor, you should want to know more.”

“This is a young girl!” she shouted, emphasizing the girl’s age in comparison to the school resource officer.

Lemon persisted, noting that all the facts should be sought out and analyzed before passing judgment on the situation. Fuentes and Blitzer didn’t say anything throughout the exchange, though they mostly agreed in their own comments. Hostin, however, never relented until the show host interrupted the segment to show a second video.

Neither did Twitter, which largely agreed with Hostin’s reaction to Lemon and proceeded accordingly.

Not all of the online commentary on Lemon has been negative however:

Check out the clip above, via CNN.

[h/t CNN Commentary]
[Image via screengrab]

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