CNN’s ‘Objective’ Don Lemon Uses Joy Behar to Smear Rick Santorum
Openly-gay CNN anchor Don Lemon dug back to a May 16 interview with liberal Joy Behar to smear GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum just before Monday night's Republican primary debate. Behar then said of the socially-conservative Santorum that he “seems like a big homophobe,” and Lemon made sure Friday to reference that smear and put Santorum on the defensive. As NewsBusters reported Friday, Lemon badgered Santorum in an airport over his positions on gay marriage. The CNN segment featured an abbreviated portion of the interview, and Lemon aired the extended version Sunday evening on the 7 p.m. EDT hour of Newsroom. [Video below the break.] Lemon labeled Santorum as “very decisive and very divisive on social issues” to introduce the interview. Then he tried to frame Santorum's support for amending the Constitution to protect traditional marriage as contradictory to his small-government conservatism. After that he brought out the smear. “I was recently on Joy Behar and she said that, she called you I think it was – I'm paraphrasing – bigoted or homophobic or what have you,” Lemon said to Santorum. Apparently, what Joy Behar says represents the highest in opinion journalism. In the May 16 interview with Behar, Lemon claimed he could still be objective in covering the gay rights debate. “I don't think just because I'm gay that it makes, it takes my brain away…or it makes me not be objective,” he told Behar. However, Lemon has a history of pro-gay bias, as NewsBusters has documented . After the Santorum interview, when Lemon was hosting a Sunday panel to discuss the interview, he hit Santorum from another angle. He declared that “many people find” that Santorum “has said some pretty disturbing things about gay people” and has “ostracized them and moved them into a corner.” A transcript of the segment, which aired on June 12 at 7:24 p.m. EDT, is as follows: DON LEMON: And we are back. Coming to you live from New Hampshire on the campus of St. Anselm College where CNN is getting ready for tomorrow night's GOP presidential debate. Hold on. All right. That's better. CNN released a fascinating poll ahead of the debate. We asked whether the government should be promoting traditional values. Now here's the response: 46 percent said yes but 50 percent said no. Why is that important? Because it's the first time the percentage in the “yes” column has fallen below 50 percent since CNN first started asking the question in 1993. That number should be very interesting to candidates like Rick Santorum, someone who is very decisive and very divisive on social issues. Here is what he had to say when I caught up with them. I want you to take a listen. (Video Clip) RICK SANTORUM, GOP presidential candidate: You know go to my announcement speech, I didn't talk about social issues. I talked about the impact of Obama care on jobs and the economy. I talked about the huge debt that we have and the obligation it deal with that. I talked about entitlement reform. I talked about the Ryan plan. You know, in all due respect, I think the media is fixated on trying to – this is how the media works, they try to pigeon-hole candidates. They're this kind of here – they fit this niche. They fit that niche. Well the interesting thing I think in my candidacy is that I fit all of the niches. I am someone who's strong on social issues but I'm strong on national security issues. There's nobody who has the experience or the levels of accomplishment that I have on national security; no one has – and
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on June 13, 2011. Filed under