Piers Morgan is naming names as he talks about why his canceled CNN show struggled in the ratings. In an interview with Politico, Morgan pointed to his lead-in, Anderson Cooper, as part of the problem.
“Could I have done with a better lead-in? Yes,” Morgan told the publication. “Anderson is a great field reporter, but does he drive big ratings at CNN, outside of a big news cycle? I don’t see any evidence of it. And yet the whole bank was being bet on him at 8 and 10 o’clock.”
Morgan added: “You look over at Megyn Kelly on Fox News and she’s inheriting 450,000 or 500,000 from Bill O’Reilly in the [25-to-54-year-old] demo, and some days I’d be getting 60,000. That’s not to denigrate Anderson so much, because I think he’s pretty good at what he does. But was he the golden boy everybody thought he was? I didn’t see much evidence of that in ratings.”
Morgan also said that he and Cooper “never really clicked.”
He added that CNN and its president, Jeff Zucker, are too preoccupied with ratings.
“I’ve always felt that CNN should be more resilient to media criticism about monthly or quarterly ratings,” Morgan said. “Ted Turner once described CNN to me as The New York Times of television. We don’t care about chasing ratings or chasing readers. We care about having a brand that is so trusted that whenever anything important happens in the world, people turn us on.”
Piers Morgan
Piers…you are a whiner !!! Since when has anybody in the television industry NOT been preoccupied with ratings. It’s your darn report card!! If you’re trying to insinuate that your program had far too much INTEGRITY to worry about ratings it shows how out of touch with reality you are. You could have had either Bill O’Reilly’s ratings or Megyn Kelly’s ratings as a lead in and nobody would have watched you.
or, could it be he’s just a lousy host?
I would like to say something positive about Mr. Morgan, so I’ll point out he fact that he is EXCELLENT at making excuses.
Or could it be that every time he had a guest on, he bated them into a gun argument/ controversy /and tried to win them over to his side of the argument, but no one was having any part of it except his handpicked guests that agreed with him. A man (and I use that term loosely) that was not from this country, telling us what our constitution is all about. I was so glad to see him get the boot, I actually jumped in the air and started yelling!….What a DOPE !
piers, if you were on fox news and had o’rielly as a lead in…still no one would watch you. go back home to britain. no one here can stand you. not cnn, not anywhere.
The most interesting revelation here is Morgan’s claim that CNN and Jeff Zucker are obsessed with ratings. I see zero evidence of that based on the programming they offer.
Perhaps people would have liked him more if he weren’t such a pompous ass…