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There are only two important questions about Piers Morgan and CNN: what were they thinking when they named this guy to host the 9 PM show in the first place and, two, what took them so long to see that it wasn’t working, wasn’t going to work and then get rid of him? It took them three years to wise up? That’s an eternity.
I will confess I’ve never had a good personal reaction to Morgan, nor have I had one on a professional level (one can dislike a personality but still admire their skill, intelligence, insight, etc.). What rubbed me raw was the idea that IN ALL OF AMERICA, there wasn’t ONE PERSON who could do this show on America’s first all news channel? Not one?
Put another way, do America interviewers go to England and take over their prime time slots? I don’t think so. The British, top to bottom, wouldn’t allow it. There is a natural tension between our two nations. The Brits are not happy that their former colony grew up to dominate the world (can you blame them?), but they, like the Europeans, also look down on us as a bunch of backwoods, ignorant hillbillys (except, they, too, would like to go to Harvard or some such place, if they got the chance).
Morgan might be the greatest interviewer in the world (he’s not), but his appearance, in the first case, cuts against him. Appearance is not everything on television, but it counts for a lot. Morgan, sad to say, looks like he has just tasted something sour and it is not difficult to conclude that the sour taste is America itself. (Okay, I confess I don’t like looking at his pouty little mouth. Does that make me a bad person?)
Morgan comes off as thinking he is better than us and that is never a good thing when coming from a foreigner, especially taking on American cultural issues. Yet, were not we, or CNN, admitting some kind of harebrained inferiority by naming him to the job in the first place? Shouldn’t he feel he is better than us if he can come over here and convince us to let him take over? People in key television jobs have evolved into leaders of the nation, sort of like television presidents. They have great influence, if for no other reason than they act as television hand holders for the nation during times of great doubt and crisis. The president comes on for a few comments in a national crisis, the news anchors and other hosts are on for hours on end. Would we name a Brit as our president, even if it were constitutional? The answer, obviously, is no. The question was not whether CNN should do it, but why we needed to look outside our country at the start.
I always thought that naming Morgan to this job was one of the weirdest appointments I’d ever heard of. It might seem like a king of worldly sophistication to name someone born outside the country to such an important job, as if we have sprung the bounds of provincialism. We are such a large, diverse and contradictory nation that it takes a lifetime for a native born citizen to fully comprehend our various differences, cultural touchstones and historical animosities. We are all of the nations of Europe combined into one, with African, Asians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans and any other ethic group you can name thrown into the mix. Here, immigrants are not merely fastened on to the side of the dominant group or culture, over time they blend into it, change it and make it something new.
There was an element of grandiosity in putting Piers in the slot. The executives looked out over the land and there was no one with a “big enough name” to take over 9 PM, so tapping someone with great exposure in the UK seemed like picking a “winner” to be a winner here. People forget that Larry King was on Mutual Radio before he was picked for a talk show on CNN and, while he was good at the job on Mutual, being on an obscure radio network in the middle of the night was not exactly like being some sort of superstar. (He was on from midnight to five am, five nights a week on the late Mutual Network.) Otherwise, CNN made Larry King while he helped make CNN. When you get to be a big shot news channel, you want to pick a big shot for such a key post. As the executives at the major networks have done for decades, the easiest thing to do is to mess it up. Go for someone notable and if they foul it up, it is not your fault, but theirs.
They changed leadership at CNN during the last three years, so presumably some dislocation contributed to keeping Morgan around. Finally they are awake and facing the obvious. Now, if they appoint Ryan Seacrest to take over.....
Surely they will avoid having another disaster follow this one? Surely?
Doug Terry, 2.24.14
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