I reached the limit of my receptivity to Piers Morgan on a recent episode of his YouTube panel discussion show, Piers Morgan Uncensored. It’s not a favorite internet news/opinion offerings—those would be the shows of Fox News alumni Bill O’Reilly and Meygan Kelly—but I’m periodically drawn to Morgan’s free-for-all by the guests, topic, and catchy click-bait banner quotations. If interested enough, I can overlook the host’s hemming and hawing in attempts to occupy some British political middle, and his far-too-regular failure to control the over-each-other yammering of his guests.
Recently, on an installment featuring CNN reporter and author Jake Tapper, Morgan’s forthright professional respect for this Democrat apparatchik and willing purveyor of hoaxes was too much to stomach. Three of the four panelists (Jillian Michaels and two other not-famous guests, including one disgruntled Democrat who was pilloried for railing about Biden’s cognitive decline) assailed the host for his willingness to countenance the smug Tapper, and platform him as the smart kid who beat everybody to the nonexistent “scoop” about how Biden was a mental and physical wreck, and worse, a president who couldn’t perform the duties of a president.
Even while taking Tapper—who had exited stage left—apart, the guests offered flaccid congratulations about the money the CNN reporter is making on the bestseller Original Sin. Viewed through a prism that refracts only reportorial initiative and capitalist instinct, Tapper’s scored. But any political wag who focuses on that and short-shrifts the blatant hypocrisy in how Tapper’s news organization and Tapper buried the lead about Biden’s cognitive decline and relentlessly persecuted President Trump has lost my eyeballs.
Tapper’s pallid defense on the show, that he only directly interviewed Trump twice and therefore couldn’t really have known the degree to which Biden was failing, is a study in disingenuousness. I understand professional respect and the need to generate views. After all, Piers Morgan got me with the Tapper interview. But as soon as I got the gist of his take, basically “good job, mate,” I fast- forwarded to the panelists who adamantly called the host dead wrong, and delivered the appropriate denunciation.
In the wake of Trump’s victory and mounting esteem amongst the flyover populace, newspeople need to find new controversies every day. Even O’Reilly and Kelly rely too much on critical discussions of news media issues and personalities.
In Trump country, it’s difficult to overstate how much these people and their organizations are hated. We get it, and don’t have to be reminded. Jake Tapper’s a feral cat who dropped on the American doorstep a decomposing rodent that he didn’t kill.
