Don Lemon Shuffle: How CNN Hopes to Solve 4 Problems at Once…

Lemon insists his move from his own primetime show to co-anchoring mornings is a ”promotion,“ but news insiders say it’s undeniably ”a hit to him“

Lemon, who had become a lightning rod for CNN’s conservative critics for comments like calling Donald Trump a “blatant white supremacist,” will now have a less politics-heavy role leading a morning show that is more in line with Licht’s goal to make the network less partisan on air. And the network retains one of cable’s most visible Black on-air stars — under a new contract whose terms have not been disclosed.

“Primetime cable opinion shows actually are mostly drawing a very white audience,” Claire Potter, professor of history at The New School for Social Research, told TheWrap. As a result, she suspects that CNN executives “don’t actually think they’re going to lose audience by moving Don Lemon out of those out of that [primetime] slot.”

Here are four ways that the Lemon shuffle could impact CNN’s future.

CNN plugs a hole in primetime – and creates a new ga …