[ad_1]
Just before 10am today, Piers Morgan finally posted the tweet he has surely dreamed of for a long time: “Good Morning Britain beat BBC Breakfast in ratings for the first time yesterday.”
Tuesday’s figure for the ITV show was nearly three times the average from when the former Daily Mirror editor and CNN host joined the show six years ago. But his best performance was also his last. Ratings skyrocketed this week as viewers tuned in to watch Morgan’s implosion.
In Monday’s edition, the host accused Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, of lying about her experiences of racism and serious mental health problems during the CBS interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was screened by ITV later that day. At the GMB on Tuesday, Morgan retracted her analysis a bit, but walked off the set when her colleague Alex Beresford defended Meghan. By Tuesday night, Morgan had left the show, after failing to agree on a response to ITV’s concerns about his comments and the more than 40,000 complaints received by broadcast regulator Ofcom.
Despite the talents of Morgan’s smart and sharp co-hosts Susanna Reid and Kate Garraway, the chances that the show will continue to match its BBC rival must now be drastically reduced. And, if ITV apparently felt unable to tolerate an unrepentant Morgan at breakfast, it’s hard to see how the clash with corporate values could be allowed at peak hours, where another network hit is Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, a series of interviews that is, ironically, heavily influenced by the psychological biographies started by Winfrey.
Although shocked, it seems unlikely that the network will be completely shocked. A few months ago, I met a senior ITV figure. They expressed their enthusiasm for what Morgan had brought to Good Morning Britain and predicted that he would soon beat the BBC’s cereal winner. “But,” they added. “Then it will go away, and it will probably catch fire because that’s what it always does. I am a little afraid of what the fire could be. ”His words proved prophetic.
Morgan concluded his tweet about the GMB ratings win with the words “my work is done.” Yet he surely couldn’t have planned or wanted to go amid accusations of being offensively insensitive to the pain suffered by millions.
An explanation of what happened could be called The Johnson Factor. Morgan was born within nine months of the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and author of The Churchill Factor. They both democratized their names, Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan and Pfeffel Johnson’s Alexander Boris, and were baptized with Roman Catholic fonts.
They were both young admirers of Margaret Thatcher, unsure whether to enter journalism or politics first; choosing the former, they wooed Rupert Murdoch. All were accused of racism in the newspapers: Morgan’s Achtung! Give up! A headline before a game between England and Germany, Johnson’s columns with tropes like “watermelon smiles” and got involved in ethical issues: tip sharing, phone hacking, and fake Iraq photos for Morgan; a made-up date and a lie about his private life to Johnson. Their lives merged again when, as the station’s popularity increased but that of politicians fell, a journalistic campaign and petitions urged: PM for PM.
Part of Morgan’s criticism of Johnson is that the prime minister seems capable of getting away with it, and the host may have come to think that this invulnerability was another similarity. It wasn’t, and it seems certain that Morgan’s newspaper columns will now try to tear the magic cloak out of the No. 10 headline.
And yet the way Morgan has left was shaped by his tactics and personality as a broadcaster. His triumphant reboot of Good Morning Britain had two core elements: severely testing the fairness rules imposed by broadcasting regulator Ofcom, and exploiting his celebrity friendships for content. Both factors were fundamental for its downfall.
Morgan has been the clear star of British television coverage of the political handling of the Covid-19 pandemic: specific facts, sarcasm and persistence that dramatize the issues in a way that Westminster journalists, subject to access codes and tone They couldn’t match. Despite the protests, Ofcom allowed unusual leeway on its incredulous gutting of cabinet ministers on infections, injections and tests. The regulator appears to have concluded that there was significant public service in bluntly questioning a government that prefers to communicate through unofficial briefings and the narrow silence and moving format of Downing Street press conferences.
However, Morgan’s anti-Meghan rants were significantly different in that the subject of the mockery was not present to respond and touched on two sensitive topics: racism and mental health.
While Princess Diana’s 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir (currently the subject of a quasi-independent BBC investigation into journalistic ethics) is rightly remembered as an extraordinary piece of television, it was followed by another less remembered. : Conservative politician Nicholas Soames. , a close friend of the Prince of Wales, appeared immediately after on Newsnight, where he effectively accused Diana of being unbalanced and unreliable.
Watching Oprah with Harry and Meghan on Monday night, I thought: no one’s going to do that to Meghan. The reason the interview was so deadly was that it was difficult for Windsor supporters to object without seeming indifferent to racism and suicidal ideation. I find it amazing that Morgan couldn’t see this, or did, but couldn’t help himself.
The reason may lie in the other key ingredient, besides frankness, in Morgan’s media brand. More than any other British broadcaster, it has thrived on both what it knows and what it knows. A weekly Mail on Sunday journal records encounters with presidents, prime ministers, movie and sports stars, all of whom immediately recognize Piers, and speed dating (often about Morgan rather than themselves). A published magazine book was called The Insider.
This approach earned Morgan an ITV interview with President Donald Trump (whom he had met on the US version of The Apprentice). A recent newspaper column announced a warm friendship with Joe Biden, and it seems likely that ITV expected that meeting in time. But while Morgan’s connections are undoubtedly good, they can sometimes turn out to be loose: Trump was dumped, on air and in print (as was Boris Johnson), when public opinion turned decisive against him.
Meghan Markle, however, is the one who got away. Morgan has often complained that, after a night in London, just before meeting Harry, the actor “ghosted” him. TV host Trisha Goddard has astutely observed that Morgan appeared to be grieving over the Duchess of Sussex issue.
Since he was surely not Meghan’s type and has a wife, even the presenter could not have believed that he was going to date the movie star. So presumably the plan, as with Johnson and Trump and others, was a public friendship, a few privileged paragraphs for their column, an exclusive interview for ITV, and then a public resignation of their friendship, which, in fact, could have arrived. this week, after Megan’s criticism of the monarchy.
But, watching his outbursts on Monday and Tuesday, it was hard to avoid the feeling that the American actor-turned-duchess was, on some level, being punished for reversing the order that a famous Morgan partner should follow: ending the friendship. herself, become world famous. , giving a great interview to someone else. Announcers are selfish and insecure, and it would have only been human for Morgan, on Monday night, to think that the rush hour sensation should have been Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
But, if so, Morgan might have learned something important from watching the show that came out. The consequences of the responses were so extraordinary that they distracted attention from the quality of the questions. Oprah Winfrey, though sometimes denigrated throughout her career as a poignant daytime host, is one of the great interviewers – a distinctive combination of journalist, psychiatrist and wise relative, who listens to responses, prompting intense follow-ups. And more importantly, even though she’s at least as famous as American presidents, you never felt like she was the most important person on screen.
During his gripping and important gutting of government ministers over the Covid-19 response, Morgan, whatever priapic satisfaction he got from grunting the truth to power, spoke on behalf of many voters. In contrast, her contributions on Meghan felt like she was enacting a strange personal psychodrama designed to comfort herself and protect the monarchy.
Morgan’s life story is one of cyclical self-destruction and reinvention. When Sky was in charge of Rupert Murdoch (an ongoing rare item in Morgan’s contacts), money would have been in him soon springing up there. Now the US owners of the network, Comcast, might be concerned about someone who left ITV so controversially. Murdoch’s planned television news network, or Andrew Neil’s GB News, seem like the most plausible future homes, though neither should assume an interview with Morgan’s best friend, President Biden, who has made comments in support of Meghan.
As for a new Good Morning Britain host, the near-homogeneous replacement on the British broadcast is Jeremy Clarkson, although the only TV content likely to result from doing that approach would be a short, highly mocked clip of the previous Top The Host’s Reaction. from Gear when told the job would involve getting up at 3am. The biggest winner of Morgan’s game is, in fact, BBC Breakfast, which will probably now go back to being the most boring but default post-dawn option.
