Piers Morgan Remains In US As Editor-At-Large Of DailyMailOnline
Piers Morgan has made good on his promise to leave the UK, sort of. The DailyMailOnline this morning named him its first Editor-at-Large (US). Morgan had vowed to leave the UK if voters in Scotland would vote ‘No’ and stick with the UK earlier this month, tweeting: “Dear People of Scotland, if you vote NO, I promise to go straight back to America.” They did.
For MailOnline, which modestly noted it’s the world’s biggest English language newspaper website, Morgan will write several times each week on the “big US stories of the moment,” the site promised. He will continue contributing a weekly column to the Mail on Sunday newspaper and hosting Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV in Britain. The site also warned Morgan will continue to maintain a residence in London, but will “be pursuing new television ventures in the US.”
Morgan returned the favor by noting 180 million people now visit MailOnline every month, 60 million of them from here in America alone.” Morgan said he will break down “the biggest stories that matter to Americans and analyze them in a way that will generate discussion and create debate.” Translation: gun control.
Earlier this month, Morgan announced, via Twitter, he was now really most sincerely no longer with CNN, after turning down a new offer to host 40 interviews over two years. In March, Mr. “One day you’re the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster” signed off his CNN primetime program — a victim of lagging ratings — with a parting shot at the NRA.
In the UK, Morgan is known for being named youngest ever editor of The News of the World, and youngest national newspaper editor in Britain in half a century, when Rupert Murdoch gave the 28-year-old him the gig in ’94. After two years, he joined the Daily Mirror as editor-in-chief which he left in ’04 and became a media columnist and host of interview shows on ITV and the BBC. He also appeared as a judge alongside pal Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent.
Here in the U.S., we know him as CNN’s better idea for its Larry King timeslot, surviving that ordeal from 2011 to 2014 – a short reign in which he made an enemy of the NRA and got questioned by London police in connection with allegations of phone hacking at the now-defunct Murdoch tabloid he once edited, as part of an investigation into illegal practices by journalists at that publication. More successfully, Morgan was a judge on the NBC iteration of Cowell’s talent show, America’s Got Talent, from 2006 until 2011, when it first took summer TV ratings by storm. He also won NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2009.
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