THE MEDIA EQUATION

Piers Morgan Can’t Wait to Bring the Worst of America Home

By Ben Smith, March 14, 2021

When Piers Morgan stormed off the set of “Good Morning Britain” last week as a Black colleague chided him for “trashing” Meghan Markle, it felt like a familiar American scene: a tone-deaf old-timer getting swept aside by an anti-racist younger generation, as the culture of media changes.

Mr. Morgan sure embraced that narrative. Last week, he tweeted, among other things, a photograph of a defiant Winston Churchill, a clip of Tucker Carlson calling him an “inspiration” and then, apparently getting impatient for the arrival of a mob, a demand that the Society of Editors remove his nomination as columnist of the year. “I am canceling myself,” he announced.

British media has traditionally presented a dynamic opposite to that of the United States. Here, we have radio screamers and spittle-flecked television hosts, while broadsheet newspapers seek to balance both sides of a story. In Britain, the newspapers are often wildly partisan and the television is customarily staid. But Mr. Morgan’s theatrics last week seemed to signal a shift, and to mark the extent to which the forces driving the culture wars are money and commercial opportunity.

“This is the moment that is going to transform British TV, and take it in a direction that is more Americanized,” Amol Rajan, the former editor of The Independent who now is now the host of “The Media Show” on BBC Radio 4, said in an interview.