It was all thanks to one statistic.
 | By Nayeema Raza Senior Editor, Opinion |
I don't love cable news. There's so much outrage, and it can be hard to parse the news from all the entertainment. So when we booked the CNN prime-time anchor Don Lemon as a guest for "Sway," our podcast about power, I was prepared to be turned off by his sensationalism. |
No, I don't subscribe to that common — and unfair — refrain that "CNN is just the Fox News of the left." But I believe that The Times media columnist Ben Smith was fair when he wrote that in a quest for ratings CNN has "amped up outrage and righteousness." Or, as Sway's host, Kara Swisher, put it to me: "It's not Sean Hannity, but it's not good." |
Don Lemon may not be Sean Hannity, but he is CNN's exasperated sigher-in-chief. He delivered live rants during prime time, shed tears at fellow CNN anchor Chris Cuomo's Covid-19 diagnosis, and made a solemn and moving declaration in 2018 that former President Donald Trump — whom he'd politely treated as "racist-adjacent" until then — was definitively racist. |
I was braced for Lemon's emotional appeals and prepared to keep cool through the outrage he often dishes out. But I couldn't. |
It hit me at about minute 34 in the interview. Lemon made an even-keeled reference to some polling. At the "height of George Floyd and the protests," he said, "if you look at the number of people who thought that he was killed, it was a much higher number" than it is now. |
"Huh?" I thought. And so did our fact checker, Kate Sinclair. The claim sent us both down an internet rabbit hole and into the USA Today/Ipsos poll to which Lemon was referring. Conducted in early March, the poll found that "now, far fewer Americans personally believe George Floyd was murdered (36 percent) compared to last summer (60 percent)." |
What could explain that huge drop? Not exonerating evidence — after all, this poll was conducted before the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin even began. |
I think what explains it is attention. Last summer, we couldn't not talk about that viral video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than 9 minutes as three other police officers stood by. Over time, news coverage and social media attention waned — and people may have become desensitized or distracted. As Lemon puts it, "the video of him dying kind of fades, because people want to somehow in their mind justify what happened." |
Lemon thinks about our attention a lot, about his power to capture and keep it. He says sometimes the news can feel like "we're watching a snuff film, or it's almost like Black death pornography." And as a Black anchor on prime time, Lemon struggles with how to cover stories like Floyd's. He tells Kara he's "not sure of where the line is, between people getting used to it where it's sort of sanitized, or where it is shocking because you see it on television." |
Have a listen to the episode here. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com |
Contact Us
If you have questions about your Times account, delivery problems or other issues, visit our Help Page or contact The Times. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment