“Everyone,” we are told, “Is talking about Pier’s Morgan’s new show on Talk TV, Piers Morgan Uncensored.” Piers, you see, is standing up to the ‘cancel culture’, ‘wokeism’ and of course ‘snowflakes’. More than that, he’s standing up for free speech. Of course he is and isn’t he the right person to talk about it?
You can’t argue with the viewing figures on his first night. No less than 370,000 viewers tuned in for his interview with Florida golfer Donald Trump, far more than corresponding numbers for any of the other news channels at that time of night. It is a fact that only 99.5% of the British public didn’t tune in. What were we thinking about? Not Piers Morgan, it turns out.
I’m not going to attempt to review the show – you would have had to watch the show to review it, as Mark Lawson did in The Grauniad – but suffice to say watching Morgan in anything is a step too far for me.
Morgan is, in my view, a modestly talented TV presenter with a monumental ego. As Lawson observed, he introduced the show by comparing himself to Nelson Mandela. It could only have gone downhill from there and it seems like it did.
The cancel culture that Morgan bleats on about, that somehow sees him censored, does not stop him writing countless daily opinion columns in the gutter press, he has numerous book deals and is rarely without a TV show in his name. No. the cancel culture he drones on about applies not to people like him: it applies to the rest of us.
We are constantly told we have a free press, a free media, but do we? Do we really? With the exception of The Guardian, all national newspapers are owned by billionaire individuals or corporations who control who says what in their organs. For example, The Sun’s columnists are from the right of politics, as are the Mail’s. The same is true at the Telegraph and the Express, although the Times, owned lest we forget by the Dirty Digger Rupert Murdoch, does seem to permit independent minds to write for it. But none of the papers allow ordinary folk to write for them. We are not cancelled: we were never invited in the first place.
In any event, is there really a cancel culture at all? I just can’t see it and if there is, it certainly doesn’t apply to the down-punching polemicists of the right wing tabloids. Richard Littlejohn, Rod Liddle, Sarah Vine, Douglas Murray, Trevor Kavanagh, Karren Brady – no one has cancelled any of them. How could they? They’re their master’s voices.
The culture wars are instigated by those who wield the power, the rich and powerful who own much of the media, not the lower orders who are expected to believe such nonsense.
And for Piers Morgan, one of the most powerful people in the media, to pretend that he is being censored, of being cancelled, is simply the act of a confidence man, a trickster, a fraud.
Good luck to the 0.5% of the population who watched Morgan last night. He’s the schoolyard bully, but only because he is protected by the aforementioned rich and powerful. When he was called out by a TV weatherman, Morgan turned out to be the biggest snowflake of them all, cancelling himself.
Hardly anyone’s watching, Morgan. Maybe because many more people then he might think are woke and, as I am, proud of it.
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