Piers Morgan should not be making headlines. It simply isn’t news to discover that his catastrophically low-rated show is being canceled. But that’s not to say the story shouldn’t have been covered. It should have been covered every day. Every day Piers Morgan was allowed to have a one-hour show on CNN was a miracle, a reminder that justice is a philosophical construct, that we do not live in a moral universe. The Associated Press should have issued a story every single day since January 17th, 2011: Piers Morgan Is Still On Television.
His Wikipedia entry isn’t even a biography. It’s a rap sheet: the criminal history of a belligerent, narcissistic tabloid huckster who spied on celebrities and made women cry and picked fights everywhere he went. Then, satisfied he burned every bridge there is to burn in Merry Olde England, he failed all the way upward to a one hour slot in prime-time American television. And somewhere in between, he stoked the fires of the class war by crashing a Segway. He broke three ribs attempting to demonstrate that rich people can afford better toys and better leisure pursuits than the underclass. But not even criminal spying and levels of incompetence typically reserved for cartoon characters could keep him off television.
Here is a 48-year-old man who has managed to write four volumes of memoirs. That is deranged. His entire life is that of a villain from an Adam Sandler or a Rodney Dangerfield movie. Criminal spying, crashing Segways, writing memoir after memoir – that’s what the antagonist does in the background of the first act before he gets the small town orphanage condemned so he can drill for oil.
Yet none of that was enough to stop CNN from hiring him. Red flag after red flag and he still got hired. Then, for three whole years, nobody watched him. FOX could have run clips of Lee Atwater’s band against Piers Morgan and received better ratings.
But that leaves CNN in a historically unique position: since they were willing to throw away the 9 p.m. slot for a show that never aspired to be proper journalism, a show no one saw, they can literally replace Piers Morgan with whatever the hell they want. Test patterns would outperform him with sufficiently competitive advertising.
So everything is permissible. No suggestion is too off-the-wall for what should fill Morgan’s timeslot. He never aspired to be a journalist, neither did he once aspire to be watchable, so why should his replacement be held to higher standards? Here's a few replacement hosts who would easily pull Morgan’s numbers, and for much more acceptable salaries. READ MORE
