Don Lemon Defends Remarks on SC Desk Flip: Didn’t Want to ‘Rush to Judgment’
CNN’s Don Lemon got quite a huge social media blowback for his comments yesterday on the video of an officer getting in a physical confrontation with a student in a South Carolina classroom. Lemon admitted the video was disturbing, but didn’t go so far enough as to assign blame yet.
He said he wanted to wait for more information to come out, but CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin shot back that it’s pretty clear from the video that this was excessive use of force. She said, “I don’t need to know more.” Lemon shot back, “As a prosecutor, you should want to know more.”
Well, both Lemon and Hostin returned to The Situation Room tonight for a follow-up discussion. Now that more information has come out about the confrontation and the officer involved, Lemon defended what he said.
He argued that the job of journalists is to gather all possible information before drawing any conclusions from it, that “the flow of information needs to continue.”
“We are a news network,” Lemon said, “which provides context and information and knowledge to our viewers. Knowledge is power. The more information you have, the better it is.”
Hostin still wasn’t having it and said all the context they’ve received in 24 hours hasn’t changed her mind from yesterday, saying that “it’s clear from an objective reasonableness standard” that the takedown depicted in the video “is excessive and unreasonable per se, just by its very nature.”
Lemon pushed back again, saying the FBI hasn’t decided on that yet and emphasizing that he doesn’t want to just “rush to judgment.”
Watch above, via CNN.
[image via screengrab]
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