Don Lemon, the CNN anchor who has been covering the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance from a number of odd and frankly questionable angles, may have taken the prize Wednesday night when he asked a guest if the missing plane could have been sucked into a cosmic black hole.
Now, it is no secret and indeed, no surprise that the mystery of Flight 370 has given rise a wide range of head-scratching, often outrageous and sometimes downright stupid theories . That’s only natural whenever there is a shortage of solid information about a significant event, as there has been with Flight 370.
But generally speaking, you don’t expect the craziest and wildest examples of pure speculation to make it on a “respectable” news outlet like CNN. Then again, Don Lemon earlier this week wondered aloud if there would be a “supernatural” explanation for the Malaysia Airline plane’s disappearance.
On Wednesday evening, he topped even himself.
Starting his broadcast by scraping the bottom of the barrel of the CNN Twitter account, Lemon opened his show wondering aloud , “What if it was something fully that we don’t really understand? A lot of people have been asking about that, about black holes and on, and on, and on, and all of these conspiracy theories.”
After joining his Twitter followers, who are not being paid Lemon’s hefty salary or are worth anything near his own $3 million bank account, in speculation over whether the Bermuda Triangle or something “just like the movie Lost ,” could have happened to the plane, Lemon asked an actual, qualified expert his question about black holes.
The expert was former U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo. And the question Lemon put to her about this whole “black hole” business was, “I know it’s preposterous — but is it preposterous you think, Mary?”
Spoiler Alert: It is preposterous.
“A small black hole would suck in our entire universe, so we know it’s not that,” Schiavo replied, charitably. “The Bermuda Triangle is often weather. And Lost is a TV show. So I think — I always like things for which there’s data history, crunch the numbers. So for me those aren’t there.”
Not to nitpick Schiavo — Don Lemon certainly wouldn’t — but a small black hole would not “suck in our entire universe.” There are plenty of small black holes dotting the cosmos. Still, that minor misstatement aside, we judge the score to be Mary Schiavo 1, Don Lemon 0.
