MY WEEK WITH TUCKER CARLSON, DON LEMON AND A CHICAGO CRACKPOT
It’s no surprise both were fired on the same day, after terrorizing viewers for years, but who knew when they interviewed me in the aughts that they’d lead America's descent into partisan media hell?
The phone rang. I was somewhere north of Chicago, where the people were pre-Twitter atwitter about the cuckoo baseball manager who’d slurred a local sports columnist. Ozzie Guillen was that manager, fresh off the rarest of local baseball conquests, a World Series championship with the White Sox.
I was that columnist, described by the Blizzard of Oz as a “f—ing fag.”
Seems he was furious about a harsh piece I’d written the previous weekend. Rudely interrupting my coverage of the U.S. Open golf tournament in New York, Guillen ripped a rookie right-hander for failing to hit a Texas batter with a purpose pitch, as ordered. It caused a national stir demanding cogent, pointed analysis detached from the little boys’ club that is a major-league dugout. A targeted baseball, I reminded one and all in print, is a lethal weapon that could end a career or kill someone. Was the Blizzard truly wacko? Evidently, he thought I should report to his office for an immediate scolding, not grasping how I was as entitled as he was to freedom of speech in America. Sorry, I was traveling on bigger assignments, watching Phil Mickelson melt down on the 72nd hole and blow a major trophy at Winged Foot, followed by Chicago’s Dwyane Wade leading the Miami Heat to an NBA title in Dallas.
The “f—ing fag” comment had gone viral by the time I returned home. That’s when Don Lemon, a news reporter from local TV station WMAQ, called with a question: How did I feel about it all? He was laughing, for some reason, when I knew my every word about the subject was being scrutinized. I was a straight man in his mid-40s who lived with his family, including two daughters, in the suburbs. It was important I handled a delicate story professionally, when my newspaper was doing anything but. The Sun-Times, in business bed with the team’s owner, turned it into a splashy debacle, including an interview with a gay hair stylist who defended Guillen in a front-page story.
“I’m disgusted by it all,” I told Lemon, calling on Major League Baseball and the White Sox to make a statement about inclusivity and suspend Guillen for at least a month. I reiterated what I’d told a local radio station: The Sun-Times was partnered up with the White Sox, making my job especially difficult as a commentator paid handsomely to hold truth to power. Lemon empathized, as I recall. Years later, he would come out as gay after he became a major evening star and Trump-hater on CNN.
That week, among other national interviews, I also appeared on MSNBC. The host was named Tucker Carlson, a preppy hunkered down in smart-ass mode despite this being his third network in two years. Sports clearly was beneath him, just as the rockhead homophobia of a native Venezuelan was beneath me. I told stories about Guillen’s lack of clubhouse couth, painting him as a buffoon enabled by his boss — White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who claimed to champion diversity but was coming off as clueless codger blindly protecting his manager amid post-trophy euphoria. Had I wanted, I could have appeared on the Fox News Channel with Bill O’Reilly, of all people, but I’d already committed to other interviews. Instead, O’Reilly belittled a naive Chicago sportscaster and amateurish Sox fan, Laurence Holmes, who’d taken exception to my fantastic “Blizzard of Oz” nickname.
The TV tour received attention in Chicago, where my newspaper editors were threatening to fire me — they didn’t, of course — if I repeated my views about their conflicts-of-interest on a local TV program, “Chicago Tonight.” My lawyer advised me to say “no comment” on the show. Figuring I’d already gone public about the Sun-Times corruption, I obeyed his decree. Besides, looking back now, that was child’s play compared to the landscape I’d already walked.
Tucker Carlson. Don Lemon. And me.
Silly me for believing they were actual journalists.
Little did I know, that summer’s month in 2006, that I was at the intersection of America’s descent into partisan media hell. With Donald Trump as the nightly blast furnace, Carlson would become the extremist ratings king of the far-right, promoting white fear among Fox News audiences who believed his every word, especially when defending Trump. His prime-time competition included Lemon, a polar opposite in ideology and every bit Carlson’s provocative match as a left-wing, anti-Trump inciter on CNN. As I watched my industry transition for the worse, night after night, I’d sometimes recall how both men were so casual about the baseball manager’s slur.
How would they handle the story today? Would they even bother — unless Trump came out and excoriated (defended?) Guillen? Or, considering the deep divisions of a devolving American culture, would Carlson exploit the social ignorance of a sports leader who once crossed a U.S. border to enjoy a long and lucrative career here? Or, having come out as gay, would Lemon stop laughing and upbraid Guillen as a homophobe?
We’ll never know, will we?
This week, almost 17 years later, both lightning rods were fired on the same morning. Carlson was exposed as a hypocrite who confessed to hating Trump while advancing on-air lies that poisoned his credibility. Off the air, he and his staff were accused of toxic behavior toward women. He gave his Fox bosses, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, a reason to dump him after his emails damaged the company’s case in a defamation lawsuit settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. Some emails slaughtered Fox anchors and his own superiors, whose de-emphasis of the network’s pro-Trump mantra prompted him to write: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Those same executives used to have Carlson’s back, even when he was spewing false and racist conspiracies.
Basically, Tucker Carlson tried to run Fox News. In his own way, Don Lemon tried to run CNN. But he also bucked his bosses, refusing to back down when the new chief executive, David Zaslav, sought more centrist political coverage at a network once known as a nation’s TV news source of record. Next thing you knew, Lemon was insulting Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and women everywhere, saying she wasn’t “in her prime” when “a woman is considered to be in prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40.” Tensions flared between Lemon and female colleagues, and once stories were leaked, Zaslav and his day-to-day lieutenant, Chris Licht, had ammunition to jettison him.
It almost seems Carlson and Lemon were fired to relieve their bosses of intense heat — the Murdochs after the massive settlement, Zaslav and Licht as CNN suffers low ratings and declining relevance. Carlson has yet to comment about his ouster, as he ponders entering the presidential race — think I’m joking? Lemon, who continued to be divisive on a softer-toned morning show, flipped his lid on social media.
“I am stunned,” he wrote Monday. “I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly … At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network.”
Nothing much surprised me about the demise of Carlson and Lemon. Until … they hired the same Hollywood lawyer to represent them in termination and severance proceedings. It reminded me that much of what they did, all those years, was an act. They are entertainers, not journalists, something I realized during my eight years on a daily ESPN show when Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless ascended as actors in other time slots.
Ozzie Guillen, too, was an entertainer. He continues to challenge the FCC and delay-button-minded producers as a TV studio analyst in Chicago.
The rest of us no longer are in TV. I don’t miss it. Years from now, when they finally stop hyperventilating and take a breath or two, I’m guessing Carlson and Lemon won’t miss it, either. Nor will we miss them.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.