Former CNN talk show host Piers Morgan has penned an “advice column” for CNN at The Hollywood Reporter. Morgan reveals he thought his lead-in Anderson Cooper was “stiff in the studio” and was regularly “annihilated” by Bill O’Reilly and needed to be replaced by Megyn Kelly. Since that didn’t happen, CNN “needs to find more of its own Megyn Kellys.”
I suggested to Jeff that Megyn Kelly would be a perfect primetime star for CNN — young, beautiful, slick, razor smart, bursting with opinions, humor and authority.
I was convinced she'd give me a much better lead-in than Anderson Cooper, who for all his qualities as a reporter is stiff in a studio and gets annihilated in the ratings every night by O'Reilly. Jeff nodded and replied, "I tried to get her." Days later, it was announced Megyn was moving to Fox News primetime, where she's been a huge hit. CNN has many good anchors, but it needs to find more of its own Megyn Kellys.
Morgan declared that CNN is fantastic when the news breaks out, but breaks down when there is no hot disaster or weather story. He says he joked with Rachel Maddow about it:
MSNBC has the same problem in reverse. Rachel Maddow does brilliantly when there's no news but tanks when there is. She's a terrific talent, and it has nothing to do with her and everything to do with MSNBC's brand: hot on politics, cold on news.
I once joked with Rachel at President Obama's Christmas party: "Bad news, I've seen the weather report for 2013 and it's nonstop hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis." She laughed, ruefully.
Morgan looked back fondly at his CNN tenure, including his gun-confiscating wishes:
I ticked off most of my interview bucket list — Clinton, Streisand, Ahmadinejad [??!], Oprah, Clooney, the Dalai Lama. I also presided over some calamitous errors, including the cringeworthy night I paid tribute live on air to a comedian who'd just died called Patrice O'Neal and got his gender wrong. ("He's a man!" screamed my horrified producer Jonathan Wald in my ear, as I waxed lyrical about this "funny lady.")
Perhaps most notably, I waged a prolonged, visceral on-air battle with the NRA following the gun massacres at Aurora and Sandy Hook. It brought me death threats, and 150,000 people signed a White House petition to have me deported. I don't regret it, though toward the end of my run, I was in danger of becoming a barroom bore on the issue of guns — shouting at the same people about the same thing with diminishing effectiveness. Jeff once said to me: "You shouldn't call these pro-gun guys 'idiots' on air. Better to say, 'I think your argument is idiotic.' "
"But they are idiots," I replied.
It remains incomprehensible to me that a great nation like America can experience 20 first-graders being shot dead in their classrooms and do absolutely nothing to try and stop it happening again. In Britain, after the similar Dunblane massacre in 1996, I led a successful campaign at the Daily Mirror newspaper to have all guns banned in Britain. We haven't had a school shooting since. America's had over 70 since Newtown alone
It’s funny that he proclaims the gun-rights crowd are idiots right after he’s just explained his “calamitous” on-air boo-boos.
