Don Lemon-Paris Dennard Fake News Debate Shuts Down CNN Segment
A recent CNN segment turned into a Don Lemon-Paris Dennard standoff after the conservative commentator continued to insist that the story being discussed, the price tag associated with President Donald Trump, was an example of “fake news.” After explaining that the information was well sourced and holding that the story was not fake, Don Lemon appeared to cut the segment short after becoming exasperated with Dennard.
The Inquisitr has previously reported that the cost to taxpayers to maintain President Donald Trump’s large family and ritzy lifestyle could run into “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The president, who campaigned on a promise of never taking any vacations, is said to be taking his third in his first month in office. It has been noted that the total cost for “trips and security” for President Trump has already risen to $15 million, or 13 percent of the money spent during former President Barack Obama’s entire eight years in office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s244gS5zus
After discussing the details surrounding the story with Maria Cardona, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Andre Bauer, Don Lemon then turned to Paris Dennard.
“I think this is fake news,” Paris Dennard responded. “This is not a news story.”
Lemon, Cardona, and Jean-Pierre quickly joined together in rebuking Dennard over his assertion. Dennard continued that the president is “not breaking any laws.”
“Do you actually know what the definition of fake news is?” Don Lemon asked Dennard. “Fake news is when you put out a story to intentionally deceive someone, and you know that it is wrong.”
The host continued that, on occasion, CNN makes errors and that sources can “come up empty,” but that he is unaware of anyone at the network ever taking steps to “intentionally deceive” viewers. Lemon continued that the facts being discussed, as they relate to the cost of Donald Trump’s presidency, do no constitute fake news. He called Dennard’s talking point “stupid” and asked the conservative to not come onto the show if he is simply going to offer a response that the information being discussed is fake. The CNN host then gave Dennard the opportunity to continue.
“Don, this is a fake news story,” Dennard fired back, “in my opinion.”
With that, Lemon thanked the panelists for appearing, viewers for watching, and abruptly ended the segment, appearing to begin to turn and stand to walk off the set, possibly in exasperation with Paris Dennard.
Writing with AlterNet, the Southern Poverty Law Center has cited Trump-supporter Alex Jones of InfoWars as a major propagator of fake news.
“He’s been spreading fake news and hysteria online for a decade, but pizzagate shows his words lead to violence.”
Yesterday, InfoWars published a piece, the title of which claimed that a court has ruled that CNN “officially puts out fake news.” The article seemed to retract the premise of the title in the first sentence, writing that the judge “didn’t all out declare that CNN was peddling in falsehoods” when she ordered that a lawsuit filed against the network by a hospital in West Palm Beach be permitted to move forward. InfoWars reports that CNN had been attempting to have the case thrown out.
In addition to Edgar Welch’s pizzagate appearance with an assault rifle at Comet Ping-Pong in Washington, D.C., in December, to “self investigate” claims of a “child sex-slave ring” being peddled by InfoWars in October, two Georgia men, Michael Mancil and James Dryden, were arrested after it was learned that they had plans to travel to a former military base in Alaska that they had come to believe “manipulates the weather, controls minds and traps souls.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which states that either incident could have ended in lost human lives, noted the common Alex Jones connection between each of the stories.
[Featured Image by Mike Coppola/Getty Images]
