By Robert McGreevy, Daily Caller News Foundation | March 11, 2025
Legacy media is dying and its former stars, once luminaries of American culture, now appear to be in the wind. Once-upon-a-time mega stars like Don Lemon and Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN, and former MSNBC anchors like Joy Reid have all departed their networks in recent years, their farewells relegating them to the world of podcasts and blogging.
Lemon, who CNN fired in 2024, raised eyebrows in late February when he tore through the New York city subway system showing straphangers pictures of memes on his phone in a stunt that some critics labeled as desperate and bizarre.
Lemon told the Daily Caller he was recreating a popular trend and maintained that the video was simply an expression of the joy he’s been feeling in post-network life.
“It’s really just me having fun,” Lemon said.
“I am a multidimensional person like anyone else. I’m having a great time. People ask me if I’m ready to go back [to CNN] and I say no. I’m loving what I’m doing,” he told the Caller, adding, “I can’t even explain to you how it feels to be this free.”
Others, however, pointed out that Lemon’s partisan past would be hard for him to escape.
“It’s difficult to connect with broad audiences when you say objectively insane things and act like a loony toon,” CNN’s Scott Jennings told the Caller.
Another one of Lemon’s former CNN colleagues, Jim Acosta, seems to be handling his network departure even more poorly.
Acosta, who left the network and pivoted to his Substack blog after CNN tried to move his poorly-rated show from 10am to midnight, recently implored his media colleagues to stop covering Trump.
“Saying that you shouldn’t cover Trump is just ludicrous,” Dan Turrentine, a former Democratic strategist who now co-hosts a popular interactive news show on the “2Way” platform, told the Caller.
“He’s the president of the United States. He’s the leader of our country, and we happen to be the most powerful country in the world. It’s just silly to not cover him. Are you gonna put your head in the sand and just wait four years? Like, it’s just idiotic,” he continued.
Acosta has managed to cobble together a fairly large following on the platform — over 270,000 subscribers to date. But his partisan bent has rendered his coverage to one particular silo of the political spectrum, restricting his broader reach.
A media clipper shared a recent hour-long podcast Acosta recorded featuring former Trump fixer Michael Cohen. The clip has under 27,000 views on X as of Tuesday afternoon.
The inability for current and former cable news stars to objectively cover Trump is likely a prime factor in their network’s declining ratings, Turrentine also pointed out.
“I think there is this kind of reckoning that a lot of people in the media and a lot of Democrats — and those two circles are concentric … In many instances they just refuse to understand Donald Trump, they refuse to just hear anything he has to say, to study why he is successful, to have respect for why he is successful,” Turrentine said.
Turrentine also noted that former network stars like Lemon and Acosta are now struggling to attract independent audiences as they try to adapt to a new media landscape, a point which a fellow media critic from across the aisle concurred with.
“It goes to show just how much these powerful corporate liberals are reliant upon their 20-something staff members to basically direct their movements and tell them what to think and how to act,” Curtis Houck, the Managing Editor of NewsBusters, told the Caller. “It just screams that you had all these people propping them up, and now they’re kind of left on their own to function, and it just doesn’t seem very appetizing,” he continued.
One terminated CNN personality, however, has managed to return to relevancy on the back of a bipartisan approach.
CNN fired former star anchor Chris Cuomo for the way he covered his own older brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the younger Cuomo landed on his feet as an anchor on NewsNation, where he regularly hosts alternative voices on his eponymous show “Cuomo.”
While the smaller NewsNation network pales in comparison to Fox News, CNN or MSNBC, Cuomo still landed a multi-year deal while maintaining a strong presence on the independent circuit.
Mark Halperin, Turrentine’s 2Way co-host, has also garnered intrigue and investment in his new platform. Years after NBC News ousted the longtime producer, Halperin has generated buzz around his twice-a-day show by engaging with all sides of the political spectrum.
Other network emigres have not been so lucky.
Chris Cillizza, who CNN let go in 2022, has been publishing consistently on Substack but has fewer than 30,000 subscribers on the platform. Compared to popular independent reporters like Matt Taibbi, who has over 500,000 subscribers, or even Acosta, Cillizza is lagging behind.
“The number of people who were closely following me leaving CNN, tracked me to Substack and/or YouTube and immediately became paying subscribers was, well, humbling-ly small,” Cillizza himself admitted in a Substack post.
Chuck Todd, a former top NBC anchor who hosted “Meet the Press” for almost 20 years, is trying to keep his name in the zeitgeist by appearing as a regular guest on a former competitor, CNN, which enjoys far worse ratings than his former employer.
Acosta, Lemon and even Joy Reid, whose Substack has become a top paid page in the wake of her MSNBC exodus, have managed to bring a bulk force over to their new independent homes, but they aren’t making waves outside of their online bubble. Few seem to be turning to these ex-cable stars as a necessary part of their regular news diet. This, Houck argues, is likely because they aren’t doing real journalism.
“If they were serious independent journalists, where’s the investigative work?” Houck asked. “You look at Don Lemon, and all he’s doing is reading the comment section like a desperate teenage girl looking for affirmation.”
Houck pointed to prescient investigative journalism in the independent media world coming from the likes of Michael Shellenberger and Catherine Herridge, the latter a former veteran investigative reporter at CBS who alleges the network hamstrung her reporting into Hunter Biden’s laptop and seized her files after she was laid off.
Since departing CBS, the Emmy-winning investigative reporter has launched her own independent investigative series and website, while leveraging the use of Elon Musk’s X platform to reach a broad audience. Her recent unedited 40-minute interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio racked up nearly 9 million views on X alone.
“We are living through legacy media’s equivalent of an industrial revolution.” Herridge told the Caller. “Not all on-air personalities have the skill set to make it in this highly competitive marketplace where original content is king and audience trust is everything. You’ve got to earn trust and strengthen it, one story at a time.”
Herridge’s Rubio interview has been picked up or covered by over 20 international outlets, she shared on X. Her other investigative series on transgender surgeries, terrorism, Hunter Biden and more have racked up millions of views and regularly placed her at the top of X’s trending tab.
The independent model she’s helping to innovate is one that, in Houck’s eyes, will promote veritable and fair reporting.
“When folks are willing to give their hard earned dollars directly to a particular personality, there’s a higher standard or bar for entry into paying for content. It requires a higher level of authenticity,” Houck noted.
“People who are going to pay for their news by funding individual, independent journalism — truly independent journalists — I think they’re going to be more judicious in how they spend their money. And if it’s just more of the same that they fled, then I don’t see any reason why they’re gonna support them in large numbers.”
Herridge’s success dwarves that of many of her independent competitors. Lemon, who has been quite active on YouTube, has found moderate success in viewership, but has yet to eclipse 1 million views on any one video since his firing.
Herridge is even competing with the likes of CNN and MSNBC, with views on her Rubio interview eclipsing CNN’s total primetime viewers for Friday, March 7 by nearly 3 million, according to Adweek.
“These numbers represent stunning growth, global reach and dwarf linear and cable TV. The challenge is monetization but that comes with a strong, fact-driven reporting product,” Herridge concluded.
Robert McGreevy is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation
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