Farewell Wanker
Piers Morgan is one of those guys who is infamous, rather than famous. people know of him, if they know of him at all, for his many ridiculous moments on CNN. Of course, hardly anyone watches CNN, unless they are stuck in an airport. The reason they hired Morgan was to boost ratings, knowing his reputation in Britain for making a fool of himself on their chat shows. Now the internet brings news that CNN have finally pulled the plug on the Piers Morgan.
There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t seem to like America very much — and American audiences have been more than willing to return the favor. Three years after taking over for Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for “Piers Morgan Live” hit some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared with competitors at Fox News and MSNBC.
It’s been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who refuses to assimilate — the only football he cares about is round and his lectures on guns were rife with contempt — and a CNN audience that is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America.
CNN’s president, Jeffrey Zucker, has other problems, but none bigger than Mr. Morgan and his plum 9 p.m. time slot. Mr. Morgan said last week that he and Mr. Zucker had been talking about the show’s failure to connect and had decided to pull the plug, probably in March.
Crossing an ocean for a replacement for Larry King, who had ratings problems of his own near the end, was probably not a great idea to begin with. For a cable news station like CNN, major stories are like oxygen. When something important or scary happens in America, many of us have an immediate reflex to turn on CNN. When I find Mr. Morgan telling me what it all means, I have a similar reflex to dismiss what he is saying. It is difficult for him to speak credibly on significant American events because, after all, he just got here.
I received a return call from Mr. Morgan and was prepared for an endless argument over my assumptions. Not so. His show, he conceded, was not performing as he had hoped and was nearing its end.
“It’s been a painful period and lately we have taken a bath in the ratings,” he said, adding that although there had been times when the show connected in terms of audience, slow news days were problematic.
The implication is that Americans are just too provincial for an urban sophisticate like Piers Morgan. Never mind that he was no such thing. It was all an act. He is a prol striver with a middling education and even less of an IQ. In the UK he worked for trashy tabloids. His role on CNN was to be the snobby Brit, lecturing the provincials about the proper way to think about politics. Since the few people watching CNN are far Left, that was bound to be a bad formula. Now the experiment is over.
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