Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon Are Out but Not Down

Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon operated on different channels that sometimes seemed like different realities. But each television host became a recurring character on the other man’s show.

On Fox News, Carlson deliberately mispronounced Lemon’s name for years; sneered at Lemon’s comments about being a Black man in America; and labeled Lemon “a guy who makes millions of dollars a year from presiding over a show that’s failing.” Just about two months ago, Carlson called Lemon “dumb and kinda crazy.”

On CNN, Lemon accused Carlson of poisoning Fox’s audience with hateful lies. He said Carlson mainstreamed “white supremacist propaganda to your neighbors and your family members.” And he said Carlson did it for the money and power, likening his coverage to a “ratings grift.”

This cable news crossfire is relevant because, as you well know by now, both men were fired by their respective networks this week. It was a coincidence for the cable ages. When the Carlson news broke at 11:28 a.m. on Monday, the Lemon drop was already in motion. Lemon went public at 12:14 p.m. by tweeting a statement saying that he had just been terminated. So now these adversaries are forever linked. And I can’t help but marvel at how much they have in common right now.

No, this is not going to be one of those irresponsible false-equivalence pieces that claims Carlson and Lemon were equally polarizing. Fox and CNN are two different species producing two different types of products for two very different audiences. But the similarities between the two situations are stacking up. Carlson and Lemon know it: They have been texting back and forth in the past few days, according to two sources with knowledge of the relationship.

By “relationship,” I do not mean friendship. Far from it. The two men have never met, and they likely didn’t have much to discuss until recently. They live very different lives: Carlson, with his wife of nearly 32 years, Susan, spends time in rural Maine and on the Gulf Coast of Florida, eschewing the Manhattan and Hamptons social scene that Lemon and his fiancé, Tim Malone, inhabit. The first photos of Carlson after his sacking showed him riding through Boca Grande in a golf cart, while Lemon walked the red carpet at the Time100 Gala.

But there is an obvious kinship that comes from being shoved from such a lofty perch at precisely the same time on the same day.

The first commonality between the two cases was the speed: Carlson, age 53, and Lemon, 57, were both notified by phone that their services were no longer needed, and both stories broke almost immediately. Fox management reportedly wanted to issue a joint statement with Carlson, according to one of his friends, but Carlson rejected that. Similarly, CNN management wanted to roll out the Lemon news in coordination with him, perhaps by issuing cordial time-synced statements, but Lemon rebuffed that and announced it on his own. “It is clear that there are some larger issues at play,” Lemon said in his statement, perhaps implying that he was fired for political reasons.

The next commonality came out within hours. When I caught wind that both men had retained the same lawyer, the LA-based entertainment litigator Bryan Freedman, I called Freedman’s office and reached his assistant, who sounded surprised when I told her what I planned to report. I surmised that both clients were so new, so freshly fired, that word hadn’t gotten around yet. Freedman tends not to talk publicly about his clients, and hasn’t publicly commented about Lemon or Carlson, but he has a similar objective in both cases: to secure money and freedom for his clients.