Some people simply can’t have a thought and keep it to themselves. When that happens for most of us, at worst it gets posted to Facebook and X and a handful of people see it — thanks for the “like,” Nana! — and then it goes away.
And that’s probably for the best because nobody cares, and, looking back, those posts are usually a bit embarrassing. Unfortunately for the world, Piers Morgan has multiple platforms from which to pontificate and drop hot-takes like they’re going out of style.
Morgan’s latest such offering concerns The View, which he dubbed “pointless” and “irrelevant” — despite viewership being up and despite a massive four-plus million viewers of its post-Election Day broadcast, its largest in 10 years.
Writing in a New York Post column, Morgan engages in a weird fantasy about being stranded on a desert island with the talk show’s hosts, describing it as one of his “worst nightmares.” Detailing the “torrid, mentally scarring” scenario, where each of the show’s hosts performs a series of sensationalized actions and goes on rants about Trump, Morgan attacks the supposed hypocrisy of The View’s hosts. This is a truly remarkable lack of self-awareness coming from a man who himself has been caught in hypocritical behavior after demanding better ethical conduct from people in the journalism and entertainment industries, and it’s not even the first time.
It’s always worth remembering that when Piers Morgan was editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper in the U.K., he was implicated in a phone hacking scandal that received massive media attention due to the unprecedented scale of the allegations. Not only was this activity unlawful, it was highly unethical. Morgan denied any knowledge of the hacking during the Leveson Inquiry, but during a later trial involving Prince Harry, the judge accepted evidence “without hesitation” claiming Morgan knew about the phone hacking across multiple years and instances. Morgan continues to deny the claims, although, during the Mirror Group Newspapers trial, no legal argument was made by the MGN lawyers against them.
In his column, Morgan continues to attack the hosts of The View for their political discourse and opinions, going so far as to call for the show’s cancellation — despite being against “cancel culture” in his own words. Where he has legitimate points, the points are lost in his vitriol — doubly exasperating because the entire column is supposedly calling out the hosts’ own vitriolic hyperbole and hypocrisy.
In his writing about The View, Morgan has done exactly the same thing he is accusing the hosts of doing, as he contributes to an increasingly polarized political space where any sense of nuance is left behind in favor of attempts to belittle and minimize opposing viewpoints in service of a loyal base. Fighting what he calls a “farcical gesture of brazen bias” with a farcical gesture of brazen bias, Morgan delivers yet another opinion carefully designed to telegraph a particular view to position himself for the continuation of his grift as a social commentator. And it’s just as boring as the last time. And the time before that. And… well, you get it.