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    This is the Fire review: Don Lemon's audacious study of racism – and love

    Don Lemon’s new memoir is an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man. “We must summon the courage to love people who infuriate us, because we love the world we share,” he writes, near the start.

    Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
    Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.
    For one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. You’ll never be a newscaster.”
    But he was, and he took off. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. Some denounced him as an “Uncle Tom”.
    The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Trump was Lemon’s trial by fire. White-hot, through it he was refined. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.
    Beginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
    “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.
    Elucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system. More

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    Trump ally Nunes sees CNN Ukraine lawsuit thrown out by New York judge

    A defamation lawsuit brought against CNN by the California Republican Devin Nunes, a leading ally of former president Donald Trump, was tossed out by a Manhattan judge on Friday.The lawsuit seeking more than $435m in damages was rejected by US district judge Laura Taylor Swain, who said Nunes failed to request a retraction in a timely fashion or adequately state his claims.Nunes alleged the cable news company intentionally published a false news article and engaged in a conspiracy to defame him and damage his personal and professional reputation. His lawsuit said CNN published a report containing false claims that Nunes was involved in efforts to get “dirt” on the then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.Lawyers for Nunes said in court papers CNN knew statements made by Lev Parnas and included in their report were false.Parnas, an associate of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, has pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court to making illegal contributions to politicians. His trial is scheduled for October.Parnas and another defendant worked with Giuliani to try to get Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden’s son, prosecutors said. Giuliani has said he knew nothing about the political contributions by the men. He has not been charged.The Ukraine affair led to Trump’s first impeachment, in which the Senate acquitted him in February last year. Trump was acquitted again last week, after being impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol riot.The Nunes lawsuit said Parnas was telling lies to try to get immunity.“It was obvious to everyone – including disgraceful CNN – that Parnas was a fraudster and a hustler. It was obvious that his lies were part of a thinly veiled attempt to obstruct justice,“ the lawsuit said.CNN lawyers said Nunes and his staff had declined to comment before publication on whether Nunes had met with a Ukrainian prosecutor.“Instead of denying the report before it was published, Representative Nunes waited until it appeared and then filed this suit seeking more than $435m in damages – labeling CNN ‘the mother of fake news’,” lawyers for CNN wrote. “In his rush to sue, however, Representative Nunes overlooked the need first to request a retraction.”The lawyers noted that California law, which Judge Swain said was appropriate for the case, requires that a retraction be demanded in writing within 20 days of the publication of a story. Messages seeking comment were sent to lawyers for Nunes and CNN. More

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    CNN's Van Jones brought to tears as Joe Biden wins US election – video

    Political commentator Van Jones cried as CNN called the US election for Joe Biden. Jones said: ‘It’s easier to be a parent this morning … to tell your kids character matters’.
    Joe Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes. With Biden’s victory, Kamala Harris becomes the first woman and the first person of color to become the vice-president
    The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights
    US election updates – live More

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    CNN’s John King and his ‘magic wall’ keep viewers entranced

    As the US election has dragged on and people remain glued to their screens, a new type of celebrity has emerged: the results analyst. And none has been more popular than CNN’s John King.
    King, CNN’s chief national correspondent since 2005, has been a nearly constant presence for viewers, fronting the broadcaster’s “magic wall” tirelessly through the week.
    With the coronavirus pandemic leading to vastly more postal votes, which take longer to process than in-person ballots, analysts such as King and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki have become the must-watch stars of the small screen. The Los Angeles Times has said King’s indefatigable efforts and insight have made him the election’s “MVP”.
    King, who said he managed just two-and-a-half hours’ sleep on election night and four hours on Wednesday, has fronted The Wall at every election since 2008. A giant interactive touchscreen that allows CNN anchors to see up-to-date voting detail by district and to analyse every possible voting permutation, The Wall has come into its own as this year’s vote count drags on.
    The 59-year old has fronted The Wall for 12- to 14-hour shifts on-screen, dissecting updates county by county and state by state, and informing viewers of the changing “pathways” for Donald Trump and Joe Biden to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to make it to the White House. More

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    TV networks left in limbo as America struggles to decide who won election

    “This is why elections are fun,” said CNN’s John King, relentlessly jabbing at one of his two giant iPads as the lead in Florida lurched back and forth. Then he said it again. Absolutely no one agreed with him.About an hour and an epoch earlier, the networks and news channels had seemed as interested in their own redemption story as they were in the election itself. They hoped for a do-over of 2016, where every glib presumption would be replaced with a cautionary note, and a radical plan to wait, no matter how long it took, to see what would actually happen.That was temporarily good for democracy, but possibly difficult for television executives, whose solemn duty was to make their product as opaque as reality. “There is no telling when we are going to have a winner,” said Martha MacCallum, introducing Fox’s coverage with something other than a bang. “It could be hours, it could be days, it could possibly take even weeks.” On MSNBC, Brian Williams told viewers: “It’s going to be a night of a lot of math.” It wasn’t a thrilling observation, but it was at least unlikely to be clipped up and played on Twitter’s infinite loop in the days ahead.Of course, there was still the odd hostage to fortune. “Biden is doing much better with white voters, and I think that’s going to be a theme throughout this night,” said David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, and you wondered if that would ultimately seem too obvious to remember or too idiotic to forget. In those moments, as the words left their mouths, the pundit class seemed like tightrope walkers: foolhardy or brave, one foot in front of another, the weight of history on their backs.Then the numbers came in, and the math went out of the window – or maybe just got more complicated. NBC’s Chuck Todd, swooshing around his own magic map, remarked: “All that tells me is, it’s going to take forever to call Florida.” Twenty minutes later, he said that the state “looked like an uphill climb for Joe Biden”. Half an hour after that, it was firmly in the Trump column.CNN’s entire broadcast, meanwhile, had become brutally compelling, appearing to jettison its ensemble of sedate anchors in favour of King’s one-man dramatic monologue on the Florida county of Miami-Dade. But, other than King’s unusual sense of what constitutes a good time, it wasn’t clear why it was still treating Florida like a toss-up.On the BBC, Andrew Neil and Katty Kay were formidable and austere, with Neil signing off from his perch at the corporation in a mood of magnificent irritation with America for not having made its mind up yet. The static cameras and distinct shortage of pounding theme music set them apart from their excitable US counterparts, which were increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other.CBS had a “what happens if” map; MSNBC had a “what if” map. Every studio adhered to an aesthetic of fluorescent Tetris. Countdown clocks and “key race alerts” with no outcome attached dragged viewers remorselessly from hour to hour. The phrase “blue wall” became ubiquitous, again.At some point , John King’s touchscreen stopped working. “You’re gonna have to come back to me,” he said. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ notorious election needles had swung firmly in Trump’s favour, and the prospect of days more trauma to come.Then one of them swung back again, and Fox News called Arizona for Biden ahead of anybody else. Karl Rove, who when Fox put Ohio in Obama’s column in 2012 had vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk, vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk.The only person who seemed certain of anything was the president himself.Trump tweeted that the Democrats “are trying to STEAL the election” and claimed that “Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!” CNN’s Jake Tapper said that “the fact that the president misspelled ‘polls’ is just ‘chef’s kiss’”, which drew the kind of social media enthusiasm on the left that you might a few hours earlier have imagined would be reserved for a victory in Texas.Instead, the naive prospect of euphoria had been replaced with the desperate urge to stave off despair. In another time, those who found themselves unable to switch off might at least have hoped to absorb their anxiety with a few fellow travellers, and a drinking game or two. This year, the stakes are too vast, the lockdowns too dislocating. Instead, they sat in their bubbles, waiting – and waiting – for the future to burst through.Fun? Trump called it fraud. “We gotta dip in here because there have been several statements that are just frankly not true,” said the NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, to her and the network’s eternal credit, even as rivals let him lie without interruption. On the BBC, a few hours earlier, the political scientist Larry Sabato had made a more plausible assessment.“We are very, very split,” he said. “This night has just begun.” More

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    'It's still early': Anthony Fauci warns Trump’s condition could 'reverse' – video

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    Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the US, has warned that US president Donald Trump’s condition could worsen over the coming days. ‘He looks fine,’ Dr Fauci told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. ‘The issue is that it is still early enough in the disease’, Fauci said. ‘Sometimes when you’re five to eight days in you can have a reversal’. Dr Fauci also said he was ‘strongly suspicious’ that an experimental antibody drug given to Trump made by pharmaceutical company Regeneron helped the president fight Covid-19
    ‘Don’t be afraid’: Trump downplays Covid dangers after removing mask at White House – live
    Contagious Trump removes mask for photos upon return from hospital

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    ‘Are you saying Trump never lies?’: reporters quiz McEnany over White House Twitter feud – video

    Play Video 1:33 Reporters have interrogated the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, over Donald Trump’s feud with Twitter. ‘The president has clearly said things in these tweets that are not true. Do you acknowledge that?’ Jon Karl, of ABC News, said during the briefing. McEnany said she did not. Earlier, Trump signed an executive […] More