Don Lemon will be able to drink alcohol on the job this New Year’s Eve after his former employer wouldn’t allow him to participate in past specials.
A former cable news anchor is hosting a New Year’s Eve party on his YouTube show after being banned from drinking on-air on CNN. Everything including photos.
Lemon routinely drank on-air during CNN’s New Year’s Eve special until 2022, when then-new boss Chris Licht enforced an alcohol ban for anchors and correspondents.
But a source claimed Licht “allowed[annual show co-hosts]Andy[Cohen]and Anderson[Cooper]to drink.”
Cohen exclusively told CNN in 2022 that he and his best friend, the broadcaster, will refrain from drinking on their annual show after CNN cracked down on on-air drinking.
(The two performed a non-alcoholic “mystery shot” on the show that year.)
But as Lemon prepares for his first New Year’s Eve broadcast as an indie journalist this year, he’s excited that “his boss won’t be telling him what to do,” the source said.
He even proudly reminded his followers that he, not Cohen, was the CNN pioneer who started the drinking trend.
“All that CNN talk about New Year’s Eve and drinking, I was the one who started it. No one was drinking. I’m like at the bar,” he explained to fans.
Lemon added that then-co-host Brooke Baldwin was “like, ‘What is he doing?'” “I’m like, ‘I’m trying to have fun,'” he said.
Producers took notice of their lively short segments, and “the more fun I had, the more they came back to me, and then they expanded it from 30 minutes to an hour and a half,” Lemon said.
“So now everyone wants to drink, everyone wants to do shots, everyone wants to do champagne. Before I started doing that, we didn’t do that,” he claimed.
Lemon’s New Orleans New Year’s Eve special will be streamed tonight at 7pm EST and will feature special guests including Luann de Lesseps, Big Freedia, Joy Reid, Sunny Hostin, Joy Behar, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Tamron Hall, and Alec and Hilaria Baldwin.
“No one watching on New Year’s Eve will have as much fun as we do,” Lemon claimed.
