Don Lemon and the Creator Class Rethink Media Power

The same week Paramount Skydance clinched its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, journalists, podcasters and media executives gathered in Brooklyn for On Air Fest, an annual conference focused on podcasting, the creator economy and the future of broadcasting. Amid two days of panel discussions on the rapidly evolving media landscape, one of the sharpest conversations was a live taping of “The Don Lemon Show” about building a media business outside the legacy system. Lemon, who left CNN in 2023 after 17 years, was joined by ESPN’s Pablo Torre and comedians Gianmarco Soresi and Jay Jurden. They spoke candidly about their pivots to independent media, the push for authenticity and transparency, and the paradox at the heart of it all: Creators have never had more freedom, or more structural vulnerability.

The panel’s most provocative argument was that point-of-view journalism has evolved beyond being simply an editorial preference for online media. Today, it’s the more trusted business model. Torre argued that legacy media’s insistence on an omniscient posture has become a liability. “Corporate media is stuck being a bit ‘voice of God’ as if we are the arbiter of neutrality, as opposed to what people are sensing, that maybe we shouldn’t trust what is being brought down to us from on high,” he said.

The alternative, he argued, is transparency: Disclose your perspective, ensure you have your facts down, and let the audience evaluate accordingly. “Independent media has leaned into the ability to do reporting from a point of view,” Torre said. “If you disclose the point of view, and you’re upfront about that, and you’re also rigorous in your reporting, then at the very least, the audience is getting something like a more honest depiction of how you as this flawed meat sack exist in this ostensibly apolitical space, how you actually think and feel.”

Building a personal brand, post-CNN

Lemon, who now runs his own podcast on audio platforms and YouTube, framed his departure in precisely these terms. “I became disillusioned when we had to put on people who were election deniers and insurrection deniers,” he told an audience member who asked when he’d soured on corporate news. His editorial philosophy now is right to the point: “Don’t give false equivalence, and don’t give misinformation. It’s pretty simple.” He described broadcasting live on the streets of New York the previous morning with nothing but a selfie stick and an iPhone, a production that would have required a satellite truck and at least eight crew members at a network. 

Lemon now handles editorial, sales, and legal himself, moving from sourcing content at 3 in the morning to business calls to prepping his 5 p.m. show. “It is a lot of work, but I love it because it’s mine,” he said. He drew a couple of hundred thousand viewers for his State of the Union coverage on what he called “my little independent channel.”

He may own all the upside, but he also owns all the overhead. That burden extends across independent media. Legacy media, for all its flaws, once provided an “insulation between the quality of the work and the economic incentive,” Torre said. Good journalism could be a loss leader inside a larger enterprise. When that erodes, “you are unavoidably doing commerce” alongside the work, he added. 

Independent creators who left networks now depend on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, TikTok and other platforms with shifting terms and opaque algorithms. Torre acknowledged the bind: You’ve traded one boss for another.

Still, the challenge of building credibility and audience remains. On that front, the panelists agreed that journalism works best when embedded in content people already consume—something Torre and Soresi, like many late-night hosts, already do. Torre, whose ESPN reporting blends sports with culture and politics, calls sports “the last monoculture,” one of the few arenas where people across the political spectrum share a live experience. The strategy, he suggested, is a Trojan horse: Present as a sports story, deliver something deeper. “It’s storytelling, it’s reporting, and it’s showing people that in this sports story, there’s this other thing which feels undeniable, because the journalism has made it so,” he explained. 

Lemon, whose easy comedic back-and-forth with Jurden was a far cry from his CNN persona, argued that humor works the same way. “When you soften the beach, people actually end up learning things,” he said.

How and where news is now consumed

That dynamic–meeting audiences where they are before steering into heavier terrain–is also shaping how political news is consumed. When an audience member floated the idea of finding “the Joe Rogan of the left,” Jurden dismissed the premise, arguing that Rogan functions less as an ideologue than as a mirror to his guests. “The Joe Rogan of the left is Joe Rogan when he’s talking to someone on the left,” Jurden said. Torre reminded the audience that when it launched, Rogan’s show focused on apolitical topics like mixed martial arts and Bigfoot. “He assembled a coalition of dudes who didn’t come there for politics and then stayed while he got into politics.”

Other On Air Fest panels reinforced these themes. “Social is turning into television. But guess what–television is turning into radio,” Audie Cornish, the former NPR “All Things Considered” co-host and current host of the CNN podcast “The Assignment,” told Observer during a Q&A session. “Nobody knows. And that’s a great place to be in.”

On the corporate overlord front, Ari Shapiro, Cornish’s former “All Things Considered” co-host, offered a promising forecast for his former employer, NPR, which lost federal funding last year. “This might be a rough year or two [for NPR],” Shapiro told Observer, but “the fact is that it’s run by journalists, not business people, not billionaires, not companies with other interests. On the other side of that rough patch, I believe NPR’s future is really bright.”

No matter how you look at it, much of that future will likely live on YouTube, where more than 15 billion hours of news content were consumed in the first six months of 2025, according to statistics the video streaming behemoth announced at its Independent Media Summit last week. (YouTube’s internal polling also suggested that almost half of all voters now rely on its platform more heavily than traditional television for their news consumption and political analysis.)

Lemon noted that legacy media is already taking cues, with on-air talent adopting the bolder, more personal style pioneered by independent creators. He took it as flattery, while Torre took it as a warning sign. “The incentive structures are pretty clear on how to at least perform authenticity,” he said. “That, to me, is always the disturbing reality of media–you’re performing what it means to be honest.”