Mixed Signals: Piers Morgan on going independent, Meghan Markle, and why he likes pouring gasoline on the fire

Meera Pattni: I didn’t want to talk about it too much, but I was a BBC newsreader. I was actually the youngest newsreader on BBC national radio.

Ben Smith: What?

Meera Pattni: And I was still there when they sent you to sort of elocution lessons.

Ben Smith: See, now I felt like I was supposed to be holding your hand. And now I feel like a clown.
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media where we’re tracking the wild changes of this media age. I’m Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Our media editor, Max Tani, is out this week on a much-deserved vacation in his native Orange County. And so I’m joined by somebody who I spend a lot of time talking about the media with, Semafor’s head of comms, Meera Pattni. Hey Meera.

Meera Pattni: Hi Ben.

Ben Smith: Very excited to have you on here this week and fitting partly because we talk about this stuff all the time, partly because you got your start at the BBC then in talk radio in London. And our guest today is a countryman of yours. I believe he was the best paid man in British media, Piers Morgan.

Meera Pattni: That’s right. Piers definitely loomed large when I was starting my career before I went over to the dark side of comms. So I’m very, very excited to talk to him. And we’re going to be talking a bit about his move to YouTube, about the clearly shifting media landscape in the US, a little bit in the UK, but really whether all of this is just making us a little bit dumber.

Ben Smith: How much were you making at the BBC in the aughts? What’s your starting salary?

Meera Pattni: Oh God, I don’t even remember. I mean, it must have been under 20 grand. It must have.

Ben Smith: Under 20,000 pounds. Well, Piers had a $50 million three-year deal that he just walked away from. So we’ll talk to him about that and more after the break.
So Meera, for me, like for a lot of Americans, Piers Morgan sort of arrived in the US fully formed but is this very large figure, this really impressive interviewer. Had a show on CNN in the 2010s. Where did we get him?

Meera Pattni: Well, he was definitely homegrown in the UK. Piers sort of made his name in the world of British tabloids as the youngest ever editor of the News of the World, which is now a defunct paper. It was 1994 and he was 28. I guess I most know him as being the editor of The Daily Mirror, which is this left-leaning tabloid in the UK, which is a little bit unusual.
And you can imagine this sort of the muckraking, the controversies that followed Princess Diana covers. And there were some fake photos, but this was also taking place against the backdrop of the phone hacking era, which was a very big moment in British sort of media ethics. Piers sort of did find himself sort of as a central figure in many of the conversations around ethics and for better or worse, has been a polarizing figure in the UK media. And then obviously, you know him from CNN and maybe the Celebrity Apprentice.

Ben Smith: Yeah. He came out of the inquiries into phone hacking, denying he ever was close to it, although he was on camera kind of joking about it, but basically relatively unscathed. I believe he won the Celebrity Apprentice in 2008.

Meera Pattni: He did.

Ben Smith: The show on CNN, went back to Britain, hosted Good Morning Britain. Got into an incredible feud with Meghan Markle in which he stormed off the set, I believe, and never came back and has kind of unabashedly traded on that in certain ways. He’s someone who I think has that incredible contemporary media quality of being just absolutely immune to shame.
But then most recently got this huge deal from the Murdochs where they employed him at every possible Murdoch outlet combined to get him $50 million a year for a three-year deal that just ended. And Morgan, instead of re-upping, has decided to go out on his own on YouTube, working with our friend Chris Balfe at Red Seat Ventures to try to enter this universe of Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and all these other independent former television personalities who are really occupying, I think, a bigger and bigger share of what used to be called podcasting.

Meera Pattni: Obviously a fascinating figure. I’m really excited to talk to him. Ben, let’s call up Piers.
Piers, thank you so much for joining us. Let’s get straight to it. Three months on your own on YouTube. We would love a report card, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Piers Morgan: Yeah. Well, obviously I’ve not been on YouTube for any three months. I’ve just owned the channel effectively for that period. So I’ve become, I guess, a more entrepreneurial version of what I was doing before.
And for me, it’s been a very interesting, fascinating, challenging, rewarding, but obvious play. And the reason I say that is that I’ve been in all sorts of legacy media for four decades. I ran big newspapers in the UK. I did talent shows. I did the Larry King show. You don’t get more establishment than that, at CNN.
And then when we launched TalkTV in the UK, which was a little bit ill-fated and didn’t really work, and everybody knows that at the same time as that was not working, what was working was exactly the same content but on the YouTube channel. And we had some massive examples of that. I interviewed Cristiano Ronaldo, the footballer, who’s a friend of mine, and 22 million people watched the content on our YouTube channel. I think about 600,000 watched it on TalkTV. We had a similar result with Kanye West, about nine, 10 million watched that interview and so on.
And so it rapidly became clear that the problem wasn’t the content, the problem was the mode of transmission, if you like. And I’ve got three sons. I owe it all to them, really. I’ve got three sons and a daughter. I won’t forget my daughter here, she’d be very upset. But my sons are 31, 27, 24, and they just watch YouTube. They don’t watch television. They watch television for live sport. But other than that, they watch everything via YouTube.
And so ultimately we did a deal where I’ve taken my channel and all the subscribers, we’ve got 3.8 million, we’ve just passed that now. We’ve taken the staff about 14 people, but News and Fox, they take a revenue share for the first four years from our YouTube program ad revenue. And they also take the same split on the commercialization of existing content up until last week. So they’re still sort of in bed with me.
And then of course, as Ben will know, because I think you talked about this when you interviewed Chris Balfe, I think, the interesting little twist in the tale was that I immediately from January went to Chris Balfe at Red Sea Ventures to get them to do the extra ad sales for us and the read over ads and so on. And I’d been telling everyone over at Fox, “You should be in business with these guys. They’re great.”

Ben Smith: Yeah, he said you were the broker of the deal.

Piers Morgan: Yeah. Well, I was, yeah. I introduced them and I introduced Chris to Paul Cheesbrough who’s now of course chairman of Red Sea as well as running Tubi.

Ben Smith: I mean, when you talk about being entrepreneurial, one of the things entrepreneurs often care a lot about is revenue. And the thing with, you had one incredible deal at News Corp where they had emptied out the couch cushions at like News Australia and the New York Post and everything they owned to pay you the $50 million over three years, make you the best compensated journalist in Great Britain.
And the thing with YouTube that I think we all feel is that it’s where people are consuming, it is not a place where creators are getting paid. I was with Ted Sarandos who runs Netflix the other day, and he said, “Oh yeah, YouTube is great. It’s a great farm league. It’s a nice place for people to learn what they want to do, and then they can come monetize on Netflix.” And you must be taking a huge pay cut to do this, no?

Piers Morgan: I don’t look at it like that because I don’t see it as just the YouTube channel. The YouTube channel, I think the way to look at it is more of a mothership. I would much rather look at the comparison as something like The Daily Wire and how they built their business over the last 10 years, where you start with a YouTuber, Ben Shapiro. You bring in other YouTubers, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh, Candace when she was there, and so on. But they all have so many other strings to their bow. They all do live shows, big tours. They all do books. Some of them make movies.
One of my favorite stories about The Daily Wire was the Jeremy razorblades story, where they fell out with some advertiser who did razorblades. And rather than go after them and try to woo them back, they launched their own brand Razors. And I think it now makes them $20 million a year. But I think my point, Ben, I think, is that the YouTube channel is almost like it’s the mothership of which a lot of tentacles can flow.

Ben Smith: Have you ever read ads before?

Piers Morgan: No, I haven’t.

Ben Smith: How are you feeling about it?

Piers Morgan: I like it, and I think my British accent goes down very nicely with the American advertisers. They like it. I posh it up massively. I don’t know if you remember Pathé News back in the ’50s when they used to read Pathé News bulletins, and it’d be, “Good evening. This is Piers Morgan for Pathé News.” I give it the full British nine yards, and they seem to like that.
So no, I’ve got no problem doing that. But I think what I see for Uncensored, and I do see it as a proper brand, is that I see Uncensored as being potentially a really big entity where I will have other people under me who will be also uncensored, but I’m also going to expand the genres. So I want to get into crime uncensored, to history uncensored, to sport uncensored, and start to build it out like that.
So I see it as becoming, I think people like me, Megyn Kelly, Tucker, all those people in the space now, I think we’re beginning to realize you can carry as much weight these days as a network. I mean, look at what’s happened with Newsmax in the stock market. I think people are suddenly woken up to the reality that the traditional legacy media valuation of stuff actually is for the birds, and that the sky is the limit in this area because it’s where young people are consuming their content.
So I wouldn’t look at it as Ted Sarandos would prefer you to, which is, I love Ted. He used to email me a lot about gun control when I was at CNN, cheering me on. So Ted and I go back a long way, and I’m a massive fan of Netflix. But I think that I see this as me running my own network now, and I’m going to be aggressively hiring people who are going to fit the Uncensored brand. And if you’re not too expensive, Ben, I might even come after you.

Ben Smith: No, I’m always censored. The deep state takes care of that. Just one follow-up though. We talked to Kara Swisher the other day, and she was very candid about the amount of money she makes, which I think people in our business find very interesting. You must be taking a hit this year though. I mean, are you going to turn a profit this year or are you going to fund this out of pocket for a while?

Piers Morgan: We’re already significantly profitable.

Ben Smith: Is your lifestyle taking any hits from this?

Piers Morgan: No, not at all. No, listen, I don’t need the money. So as you know, I had a very lucrative deal, which I was very happy about. I wasn’t exactly poorly paid in the previous 30 years. So this for me is not about short-term, how much I’m going to get paid. In fact, I was, in the end, made a very, very generous and big offer to stay, but as a talent. So it wasn’t that they wanted me to leave. And it’s all been very friendly and amicable right to the top of the company. I go back with the Murdochs a very, very long way, and I have enormous respect for them.
But I think they understood that I just have a burning desire to do something on my own, or to at least build a business in which I have a controlling interest, and I’m excited by it. I think it’s, A, it’s fun. B, you’re your own boss. I’ve never got to fire myself, which would be a unique twist on my rollercoaster career. But already what was interesting, I gave some interviews back in January, February to the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and others. And off the back of that, a lot of very, very, I won’t reveal too much about them at this stage, but a lot of very interesting people came forward who want to invest. And I think what you’re going to see is some news on that front very soon.

Ben Smith: Oh, so you’re going to raise money, you’re not just...

Piers Morgan: Oh, yeah, yeah. And these are significant players who want to invest significant sums of money. So I don’t think, Ben, you need to worry too much about how I’m going to finance my next sandwich purchase, if that’s what’s concerning you.

Ben Smith: I was a little concerned, yeah. You don’t want to name any of your investors, do you? I feel like Paul Marshall is investing in everything these days.

Piers Morgan: No, I’m not going to name any at the moment, but I can tell you there are some big players who are very, very keen to get involved in the Uncensored business. And so I would watch this space sooner rather than later. And then I think the scale of it will become a lot clearer, a lot quicker.
But I don’t think it’s a particularly difficult business model to game out. I think it makes perfect sense. I look at places like The Daily Wire, I really admire what they’ve done. I have a lot of their people come on. You went through a kind of YouTube eco space, we all go on each other’s shows all the time. That is all ships rising, if you like, in the ocean. And I really like it. Unlike the British tabloid world where we used to try and kill each other all day long, in this world, everyone helps each other. It’s a really baffling new concept for me, but I really like it.
So we do have, right now, in terms of the numbers we’re getting for the content on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel, we are getting numbers right up there with anyone in the news opinion interview space in the world. So it’s not like I’m out there as a fledgling startup business, it was that I was doing... I’ll give you an example, Bassem Youssef, who’s the Arab John Stewart, fascinating, brilliant character actually. He came on Uncensored just after the start of the Israel-Hamas War.

Ben Smith: That was an extraordinary interview. Yeah.

Piers Morgan: Well, 24 million people watched it on the YouTube channel, and I can’t remember how many watched it on TalkTV because it was still going. But that was the tipping point for me is saying, “Why are we still creating a linear version that not many people are watching,” which is very expensive to do, which is probably tailored to a much older audience and is requiring me to go to an old-fashioned studio scheduled time of like eight o’clock at night live and then have adverts cramming everything into 47 minutes.
None of it made any sense. And so I genuinely was having very open discussions saying, “Look, I think we should just go fully digital.”

Meera Pattni: Well, Piers actually an interesting point on that. And look, I know your kids aren’t watching cable news, but Fox News this week just had their best quarter ever, 2.2 million viewers a day.

Piers Morgan: Well, yeah, I’ve been on it this week, so that’s probably why. But Fox have been very, very dominant, no question, in cable. They’re crushing CNN, crushing MSNBC. But I think the overarching point is where will it all be in 10, 15 years? And if your average audience in cable news is 70 across the board, then you can see that it’s a bit like the vinyl digital music journey.

Ben Smith: Not sure Rupert is going to be thrilled to hear that.

Piers Morgan: Yeah. Well, nobody likes to hear the obvious reality, but it is the obvious reality to me. So I think Fox will be dominant for a considerable period of time as they are now, probably increasingly so and kudos to them. But there’s a reality check coming, which is my generation of kids, my kids’ age group do not watch cable news.

Meera Pattni: But Piers, you said that you’ve got sort of 14 staffers. Do you miss anything about traditional media? I mean, you’ve got to miss someone, maybe-

Piers Morgan: Nothing at all.

Meera Pattni: Running out and grabbing your pret.

Piers Morgan: I’ve got someone who does that. In fact, you’ll love this story. It’s a great story, this. I’m so glad you asked me that question because when I was editor of The Daily Mirror in London for nearly 10 years, and I had a brilliant assistant called Kerrie, and she announced she was leaving. She was someone that could look at me at lunchtime and instinctively know without me saying anything what sandwich I wanted. It was a freakish telepathy. And then I just couldn’t think about replacing her.
And then ultimately the day came when she was leaving and I had the chocolates, the flowers, the champagne, everything, and I was just dying inside thinking I haven’t found the replacement. From Monday, I’ve got to find my own way of getting a sandwich and it was killing me. And then hilariously, 20 minutes before I was due to make her presentation, I got called down by the chief executive and fired. And I rang Kerrie from outside and I said, “Good news!” She said, “What?” I said, “I don’t have to worry about replacing you.” She went, “Why?” I went, “I just got fired.”
And anyway, cut forward 18 years, Kerrie had gone off to have children. She had two kids, two sons. And then three years ago when I came back into the Murdoch fold, by then she’d become an assistant to some of the editors at The Times and The Sun and so on. And she emailed me and said, “I don’t suppose you’ve got any jobs going.” So my assistant on Piers Morgan Uncensored for the last three years has been the same Kerrie who left that day when I got fired from the Mirror.
So in answer to your question, it’s all sorted. The Pret a Manger chat is all sorted. It’s the same. And she doesn’t even have to ask me. She looks at my tormented face and says, “I know what he needs.” He needs a chicken pickle from wherever, or he needs a tuna salad. She just knows. And that kind of thing is priceless.

Meera Pattni: Wow.

Ben Smith: So back on the editorial front, away from the culinary conversation, to me, the most interesting thing about your show is that it seems to me you’re quite deliberately sort of breaking down the remaining barriers between, I don’t know, what I see as sort of establishment media and what used to be kind of an alternative media space. You have right-wing YouTuber Dave Rubin on with Congressman Jake Auchincloss. You’ve got serious academics on with Joe Rogan talkers talking about whether there are power plants under the Giza pyramids.
And it just seems like, I’m curious if you were sort of following the merger of these worlds, if you’re trying to drive it, is this a good thing or a bad thing? How do you see that?

Piers Morgan: I would see myself, I think Joe Rogan got it right. I think people slightly misinterpreted what he meant when he said, I’m now the Jerry Springer of political discourse. I think what he meant was the ringmaster in the sense of I don’t lead from a sort of ideological big 15-minute monologue into whatever. I get people on from all sides. And my criteria is smart people. I just want smart, passionate people who can argue their side, but I want to have them arguing.

Ben Smith: Is it smart people or is it people with big YouTube? Seems like there is a subset of people who, and we could argue, I don’t know, I haven’t seen their test scores, but it seems like their qualification is having big YouTube followings rather than expertise.

Piers Morgan: Well, I don’t like having idiots on. Sometimes, well, the pyramids one was an interesting example. I don’t know much about the Egyptian pyramids. I’m now a world authority having done this debate last week.

Ben Smith: I mean, actually everyone agreed it was idiotic, right? Like the power plants under the pyramids.

Piers Morgan: Well, interestingly, even the ones that you thought where might be slightly to the wacky side of the debate, I don’t think any of them really think that there’s an Atlantis hovering under the pyramids. But I think my point was, it was a very interesting debate. Interestingly to me, nearly two million people watched that debate. And it was actually an enjoyable, interesting debate, albeit they all ultimately agreed that there probably is nothing to it.

Ben Smith: Honestly, I felt a little bit dumber after watching it.

Piers Morgan: But they’re what I call a little Friday special. The bread and butter is to take what’s happening in the news, all-America centric, to take what’s happening in the news and to put the smart, opinionated crowd together and let them duke it out.

Ben Smith: One thing I’ve noticed, and I’m curious if this is deliberate or how you see this, is I think that you bring in more pro-Palestinian voices and more sort of intensely pro-Palestinian voices than I see in most US TV. The Bassem Youssef thing where he went on for, God, it must have been 40 minutes in a really black satire mode of deaths in Gaza, was really pretty extraordinary TV. What do you think of that? Do you feel like the US media space is too closed off to those voices?

Piers Morgan: Yeah, I do actually. Yeah, I do. I think it is. I think that I’m unusually around the world, actually. So I was amazed by the reaction to that interview. I was so amazed. I then got on a plane and went and interviewed him again at a comedy store in Los Angeles where he used to play his trade as a comedian, and we did a two and a half hour interview, much more in depth about the whole conflict.
And his knowledge of it, albeit skewed from a Palestinian perspective. He’s Egyptian, but obviously has his sympathies lie on that side of the fence. But he was really fascinating and incredibly knowledgeable. But I do think generally speaking, certainly here in New York for example, how many times do you see really quite full-on passionate Palestinian voices given much airtime? You don’t really.

Ben Smith: Why do you think that is?

Piers Morgan: Well, probably because you have more Jewish people in New York than I think anywhere outside Israel, right? So there’s probably less of an inclination to put on fiery incendiary voices from the other side of this war, and I can understand that.

Ben Smith: There’s a lot of pro-Palestinian Jewish people in New York.

Piers Morgan: There are. Well, I think the fact you asked me the question means you know the answer, right? I mean, you agree with me, do you or not?

Ben Smith: You know, I don’t actually. I think American politics around Israel is, I don’t think it’s as driven by Jewish Americans as it used to be. I mean, I think it’s gotten pretty complicated. And the Trump administration, making them really one of the main, main focuses of the early days, a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters isn’t really about sort of playing to Jewish voters, particularly I don’t think.
It’s an intro. I think I haven’t totally figured out what it’s about. But actually it made me wonder, do you ever worry that you’re going to get denied entry into the United States?

Piers Morgan: No, not with Donald Trump calling me every three weeks as he is at the moment.

Ben Smith: Oh, is he still, is he watching Uncensored?

Piers Morgan: I actually sent him a text on Monday. No, when was it? I sent him a text on Saturday saying, “I’m turning 60 tomorrow, Mr. President.” I said, “And if you’re thinking of an appropriate gift,” I said, “for your old apprentice friend,” literally I said this. I said, “Then I’ve never interviewed an American president at the White House. And in fact, I’ve never been to the White House while you’ve been president.” And then I got a reply saying, “I think, well, we should try and make this happen.” So watch this space.
But I’ve interviewed Trump maybe, I don’t know, maybe 40 times over the last 15, 20 years when I know him. And I did The Celebrity Apprentice back in 2007, ’08. So we’ve known each other for a long time. But yeah, he rings me up randomly. He rang me the other day just to say he thought I was looking good on TV, which I have to say from a pure ego-stroking viewpoint was the most amusing conversation.

Ben Smith: We’re talking today on Liberation Day.

Piers Morgan: We are.

Ben Smith: Do you think this administration is going well?

Piers Morgan: Do you know what? I think it’s absolutely fascinating. And I am very hesitant to go too quickly with a judgment before we really know if this is all going to work. I mean, I completely understand the overarching plan, right? I understand Trump understands that the American economy, riddled with debt, something has to change. Riddled with waste, that has to change. Manufacturing has been disappearing fast, that has to change if America is going to remain the number one superpower in the world, huge competition from the likes of China and so on. So I totally get why they want to do something dramatic and radical.
I also think, and I believe this strongly from having talked to him maybe seven or eight times since he got shot, that that shooting really changed him. And I think also winning big changed him. I think the two things, a second chance at life and a second chance at the presidency. He just thought this time around, I’m just going to go for it and I’m going to do all the things I wish I’d done the first time.
Got derailed by the pandemic. I’m not going to have disloyal people around me who are going to be leaking left, right, and center. That’s why he’s chosen the people in his cabinet that he has. They’re all good on television and they don’t leak, and they’re all ferociously loyal. It doesn’t mean they’re all going to be brilliant early on at their jobs. As we’re seeing, they’re making a few mistakes and so on.

Ben Smith: You’ve got one of those. I think you have at least one of the three qualifications to be a cabinet member then.

Piers Morgan: Yeah, but I’m not American.

Ben Smith: Well, I don’t think that’s required.

Piers Morgan: No, I think it’s really interesting. I mean, look, if you look at it I think in totality, I think what’s happening on the southern border, for example, is quite startling and not getting nearly enough attention. I mean, they’re pretty well arrested, the huge tidal wave of people coming over illegally on the border. It’s extraordinary. I’m not getting, I don’t think anything like the attention it should be getting.
The tariffs, I’ll be really interested to see what happens. Obviously we’re all going to hear in a while, a few minutes actually. But I understand what they’re trying to do and I understand that he wants this whole America first thing. It all plays into that. And I think Trump is a genuine patriot and he wants to make America first and America manufacturing a powerhouse again and all of these things.
The question is, can it work? And I just don’t know. I don’t know where we’re going to be in six months time. It’s a bit like the two wars that he’s determined to try and end. A, it’s very refreshing from outside America to see a Republican president who wants to forge peace, not war. Very unusual. I mean, if you go back in the last hundred years, how many Republican presidents could you genuinely say, “Were constantly forging peace, not war”?
So I hope he’s successful. It could well be. We end up at the end of the year. I wrote this in The Spectator last week. You could end up at the end of the year for all the noise and the turbulence and the rollercoaster ride we’re currently on. You could end up with Trump forging peace in Ukraine and in the Israel-Hamas war and getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And he could see the American economy up and firing and manufacturing on fire, and the tariffs have all calmed down. It’s all much fairer to the United States as far as he’s concerned. And you see Europe paying much more for its defense, which it should have been donkeys years ago, and that could easily all happen.
Or we could be sitting here at the end of the year and it’s total carnage and total chaos. And in which case, it would be a very different narrative leading into the midterms and the next election. But I think to try and judge it after 10 weeks is I think a bit pointless.

Meera Pattni: We’re going to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back with Piers Morgan.
I want to turn it back to the sort of media story. I hope this next bit is not triggering, but back in 2021 after Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah.

Piers Morgan: Uh-oh.

Meera Pattni: I know, take a breath. You said on air, Good Morning Britain, that you didn’t believe her claims about mental health and mistreatment by the royal family. Ofcom, which for our American listeners is the UK’s broadcast regulator, received a record 58,000 complaints, but ultimately cleared you and defended your right to free speech. I’m curious if you could see that kind of media regulation sort of taking hold in the US and whether it works in sort of this environment that we’re in.

Piers Morgan: I don’t think it does really, because I think as you’re seeing the migration to particularly very independent digital individuals really running their own worlds and stuff, the idea you’re going to have a regulator regulating everything else but not being able to regulate that in any meaningful way, I think is a bit pointless. So I think it’s kind of like the genie is out of the bottle on that.
I mean, Ofcom is a bit of an anachronistic thing anyway for Americans. They’re like, “What is this weird thing? A government regulator telling broadcasters what they can do?” I’ve not really got any problem with it. I mean, ironically, I was working for a major media company, ITV in the UK who didn’t seem to understand that I had a free speech right to not believe Meghan Markle.
I mean, now of course it would be reversed where at the time, I was told either you apologize for disbelieving her or you have to leave. Now I think it would be the other way around. Now they’d say, if it happened today, they’d say if you believe Meghan Markle, you’re going to have to leave. In other words, the scale of veracity around her I think has turned into Pinocchio level. I mean, many in the UK, I have to say, she’s just incredibly unpopular. No one believes a word she says. So I think I was a little bit ahead of my time.
But I think that the interesting thing for me from a media perspective was it took the government regulator to decide that I had a free speech right not to believe somebody, which you would think is bleedingly obvious. And they concluded, Ofcom, by saying it would have been a chilling, their words, a chilling infringement of my free speech rights if I had not been allowed to say what I said, which I thought was a really good thing actually for them to conclude.

Ben Smith: I’ve always thought of you, and when I wrote about you at The Times, you always struck me as like the most self-aware person I’d ever written about. I think I wrote something that I thought was like a pretty tough column about you, and you immediately WhatsApped me like, “Thanks for spelling my name right,” or whatever.
And yeah, you’ve sort of been in this game for so long. And I’m curious, when you do something like you sort of develop this dramatic storyline about whether Meghan Markle had spurned you, whether you were out for revenge, is that deliberate? Are you thinking through, “You know what, I could really use as a big fight with Meghan Markle”? Are you operating on instinct? At some point, do you say, “I’m going to keep pouring gasoline on this”? Are you self-aware or is this all instinct?

Piers Morgan: I think I’m self-aware. I’m totally aware of the power of chucking gasoline onto stories. I’m perfectly happy with the center of a gasoline fueled story. I love being at the center of media rouse and whatever. It’s great fun. I mean, I honestly believe my mantra in life is outside of death or terminal illness, don’t take anything too seriously, right? I mean, really, what are we in? We’re in the game of talking about stuff in the news.
So many journalists get so pompous and they take things so seriously, they’re so worthy. I see them all the time. I was like, just wind your neck in, all right? We’re all in the business of a form of entertainment, news in its way and debating the news and talking about the news is a form of entertainment. I think I do it in a pretty entertaining way. I think I try and remain absolutely knowledgeable about what’s happening in the news. I can do it from a perspective of knowledge.
But am I myself aware? Of course, I am. The thing about Meghan Markle that made me laugh was that I actually was very supportive of her right to the marriage. I thought it was great that she was marrying Harry. I got to know her a little, I didn’t know her. I only met her once. Got to know her a little bit and thought she was perfectly nice and it was a good marriage and so on.
But then what happened was once they got married, her and Harry began behaving in the most ludicrously hypocritical manner, which led to the media collectively, not just me but everyone, criticizing them for their hypocrisy, and they couldn’t deal with it. So they were like preaching about the carbon footprint and using George Clooney and Elton John’s jets like a taxi service. They were having tweets about taking poverty more seriously on their Kensington Royal site, whatever it was, the Sussex site. And at the same day, having a half a million dollar baby shower in New York. It’s like the whole thing was getting ridiculous, and they couldn’t deal with the criticism.
So then it became a very fractious media against them battle. But I felt they were treated perfectly fairly until their own behavior warranted criticism, which all the royals get if they’re hypocrites. And I felt their inability to deal with it has continued to be something that has haunted them ever since. They cannot take criticism.

Meera Pattni: Well, Piers, you are sort of talking about not taking yourself, not taking things too seriously. Do you think that American journalists take themselves too seriously? Are they too-

Piers Morgan: Oh, my God.

Meera Pattni: ...too self-righteous?

Piers Morgan: Terrible. Honestly, I could scrape the worthiness of some of their foreheads with their little furrow brows. If you ask me, why is Fox so successful? It’s because actually a lot of, they have a lot of warmth. I was talking to Greg Gutfeld about this. Why is Greg Gutfeld emerged as this powerhouse of cable news, both on The Five, which is a brilliant show because they have fun. It’s warm. And The Gutfeld Show is fun and warm, and they have cutting humor, but they rip into everybody.
On The Five, they have somebody in the liberal chair who gives the alternative view. CNN’s got immeasurably better since Scott Jennings started being given plenty more airtime.

Ben Smith: I think I’m supposed to furrow my brow here, Piers, and say, “But aren’t these serious times and serious questions?”

Piers Morgan: Listen, like I say, short of death and terminal illness, you can have a bit of levity in the mix. When I watch an hour of cable news and no one cracks a smile, whatever is going on, I’m likely to take the stick out of your ass all of you. Just relax a bit. I honestly believe the magic of Fox and why it’s doing so well and why so many advertisers are now flocking to Fox, which they weren’t before, it’s because they all have fun.
If you watch Fox and Friends, everyone’s having a good time and they’re making serious points, and they’re interviewing people from both sides. Same on The Five, same in Primetime. No one’s taking themselves overly seriously. Can you honestly say that about CNN with a lot of their programming or MSNBC or the others?

Ben Smith: I mean, I know what you mean, but I also, I just listened to your interview with Tucker Carlson, and you have this wonderful thing you do when someone is, when you disagree with somebody, you sort of lean back a little and you say, “Hmm.” And Tucker, honestly, most of the interview, you were asking him about Ukraine and trying to figure out what he thought, and he was trolling you and making fun of you and cracking jokes, but refusing to really engage or be pinned down.
And that is a lot. When you talk about levity, a lot of it becomes trolling, becomes this sort of vacuousness too. And I could tell, honestly, I could tell that it bothered you when he was doing it.

Piers Morgan: Oh no, it didn’t bother me. No, no, it didn’t bother me.

Ben Smith: Or that frustrated you in some way, like he wasn’t really engaging.

Piers Morgan: No, no. When someone looks at me straight in the eye and says they think that Zelenskyy is the real problem in this war, and of course they brought it on themselves and then turns into telling me that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II, it’s not anything other than just slightly annoying, but I was quite happy to debate that with him.

Ben Smith: But it wasn’t really a debate. It was what you said before. It was just, it was sort of comedy instead of news.

Piers Morgan: Well, it’s not comedy. It’s not comedy, but it’s an entertaining exchange of views often about serious matters. And you can do both. We had some serious exchanges in that, and we had some moments of great levity. And actually both, we did 90 minutes of my show, 90 minutes of his, both did gangbuster numbers.

Ben Smith: Live from Riyadh. This was the most 2025 possible media event.

Piers Morgan: Totally surreal. We happened to be there doing the same speaking gig, and we were like, “Why don’t we just do an interview?” We did it at the Diriyah Ruins site where the House Al Saud was created. And actually the mere fact we were able to do it without anyone telling us any form of, you can’t say this and can’t say that was in itself quite interesting.
So look, I don’t take myself as... I think you know, but I don’t take myself too seriously but nor do I take myself not seriously enough. I know I’m in the serious news business. I know that a lot of the programming that I do on my channel is very serious. We do talk about the Israel-Hamas war a lot. We do talk about Ukraine a lot. We do talk about democracy and Trump and all these things, but we also always try and have a bit of fun, always.
And I think the day you don’t do that on the airwaves is one of the reasons why legacy media, for want of a better phrase, one of the reasons it’s getting less popular as people like me and Megyn and others are beginning to get more popular, is I think we do just have a bit more fun. There’s a bit more edge, a bit more bites, a bit more uncensored. It can go longer, it can be feisty, it can be fiery. We don’t care what we say. There’s an unpredictability to it, and you’re away from that rigid thing of a one-hour program with ad breaks coming at this set time and set time. It’s all very, to me, that’s very restrictive.
Now, it’s not to say there aren’t brilliant practitioners at it, but I do think you’re going to see in 10 years’ time a completely different landscape where YouTube in particular will be the dominant platform in the world by far. And I think that’s already happening. And if I can be at the forefront of that now, I think people will look back in a few years and think I’ve been probably a little prescient.

Meera Pattni: So you talked about legacy as we open this interview, and you’ve really ridden the sort of whole media transformation from print journalism to broadcast. Now, I don’t know if you could call yourself an influencer if you want to, but how do you see this landscape changing over the next few years? And does it consolidate more? Does it fragment more? Where are we going?

Piers Morgan: I think you’re going to see a lot more people like me who have quite big followings, maybe a big YouTube channel, whatever it may be, who become their own little media entities. And I think you’re going to see a gravitation of young people away from conventional legacy media institutions, which they don’t really read. They don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch television. And I think that you’re going to see a lot of people like me who were perhaps associated with conventional media will be going off and doing their own thing. And I think some of us are going to be enormously successful.

Ben Smith: I mean, it does occur to me that people you cite, you, Megyn, folks like that, we’re talking about enormously successful professional television broadcasters moving to a slightly new medium and going a little bit longer. I mean, isn’t it worth talking about just kind of slightly longer form TV? And that actually doesn’t sound that new.

Piers Morgan: Well, I think you’re missing the point. I do think it’s significantly different because when you talk about going long, we can go three hours if you want. In other words, you have complete freedom.

Ben Smith: God help us.

Piers Morgan: Yeah, exactly. But actually you’d be amazed there’s a real appetite for young people to listen. That’s why Joe Rogan does two, three-hour podcasts all the time. People do listen to this stuff, and that’s a very refreshing thing. Look, not everyone that migrates from legacy media will be able to crack this because their personalities probably aren’t up to it. Their opinions are not that interesting and they’re just probably putting their toe in the water because they think there’s nothing else they can do.
I believe that what I’m doing is going to, I think you’ll look back in five years’ time and you’ll see that this interview I’ve given you about the way I see the Uncensored brand developing will be exactly how it develops. And we’ll have a lot of financial clout behind us and it will be incredibly successful. And there will be lots of mini me’s running around, hopefully for the future.
I look upon it as like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart when he created John Oliver and all those guys. I want to go find the next me’s. God knows where I’d find people like me, but I’m sure they’re in there. I want to go find young, opinionated, feisty people who are not afraid to get stuck in, who’ve got thick skins, who can debate well and who can actually make the news both relatable and entertaining and interesting and challenging and thought-provoking.
And the best thing that I find is when I’m walking around and people come up to me of all ages and they all say, “I really like that debate the other day. You really made me think and I changed my mind.” Great. That’s really what I want to do. I want people to hear all the views. And I do think that my show, unlike everybody else’s, probably has more of all sides of these debates at the same time in a way that’s very revealing a lot of the time.
Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it turns into a complete fun fight circus, and I don’t like that actually. It’s just a bit unwatchable. But most of the time, I think we hit that sweet spot of smart, passionate people who have completely different views, locking horns. And at the end of it, hopefully the viewer looks at it, listens to it and goes, “Actually, I’ve learned something from both sides here, and it’s slightly changed my view one way or the other.”
That to me is performing a valuable public service in the information world that we now live in. Particularly when you have social media with so much disinformation and so much warped and skewed stuff flying around, I think it’s an important thing.

Ben Smith: Well thank you for taking the time, Piers.

Piers Morgan: Thank you guys. Always a pleasure.

Meera Pattni: And happy belated birthday.

Piers Morgan: Thank you. 60 is the new 40, I keep being told. No, it’s fun. I’m very energized and excited for the next few years. It’s going to be fun.

Ben Smith: So Meera, what’d you think?

Meera Pattni: Really interesting, complex character. I think it sort of feels like he’s in his element at the moment. I was sort of reading this GQ profile of him just before we did this, and there’s a reference where he says, I’m not conservative leaning, I’m just a pissed-off liberal. And it’s interesting now in this moment we’re in where things are so unbelievably polarized and it’s almost like recontextualizing people like Piers who does have people from all sides on his show and does kind of hear people out whether you agree with all of those voices or not. So obviously sounds like he’s having a ton of fun. Doesn’t really miss Murdoch land or TV land.

Ben Smith: I don’t buy that he doesn’t miss the money. I mean that was just one of the great deals. But I also do think he authentically is not one of these people who’s primarily motivated by money and you just see his absolute love for the game.

Meera Pattni: Yeah. You know, obviously is a sort of news and tabloid man sort of through and through. And I don’t think that kind of mentality ever leaves you. And that world, whatever you call it, is a fun world, right? It’s outrageous. It’s not taking itself too seriously. And you know, it’s interesting that he sort of brought that over to this sort of new platform.

Ben Smith: Yeah. And it is interesting. I do think there’s a level of confidence now about the business from folks in that world, that they’re not really going out on a limb. He didn’t feel he was going out on a limb. He was taking a really successful thing and almost sort of unleashing it and taking some equity in lieu of some cash.
But basically, I think there’s now really like a model. You’re not like going out into the wilderness anymore. You’re following a very well-trodden path. I mean, it is really notable that these are major, major broadcast figures people. Tucker, Megyn, Piers, these are among like the 20 most famous television hosts in the world who are doing this. And obviously, the legacy media kind of put all, invested very heavily in these folks and they’re now taking it out on their own, which I suppose is sort of the curse of media operators everywhere these days. Your talent just walks off.

Meera Pattni: I know. I felt you were trying to say to him, well actually this is the sort of safest thing that you could have done because as you say, a path has been forged and it isn’t this sort of fringe bloggers or substackers, it’s very slick former TV anchors who know how to debate.

Ben Smith: Yeah, and there is, I mean, I think you can argue about the US debate over Israel. I actually don’t totally share his views on where this is coming from, but there’s obviously a narrowness of all kinds to the US media. It’s parochial in certain ways. It’s sort of inward looking, it’s very partisan and polarized, and there is something in these new spaces.
I mean, I like to think this is some of what we’re doing too, definitely try to broaden the window just in a world like that to try to help you understand views, that you’re not getting inside your bubble. And Piers, honestly sometimes for better and for worse, like with the people with the Giza power generators, he definitely does that.

Meera Pattni: It was obviously aliens, right? Aliens made the pyramids?

Ben Smith: Something, something alien. It was funny because even the guys he’d brought in from Rogan wouldn’t go there with him. So it was a slightly disappointing episode.

Meera Pattni: Yeah. What was your, I mean, because we’ve talked about Piers Morgan only in the context of when we’ve been booking for our big media events and you’ve brought his name up. And I can see the appeal, and the reach is obviously huge as we say.

Ben Smith: Yeah. He’s kind of this sui generis figure. I don’t know, it’s sort of... I mean, I think he always wanted a huge American show and never got one because he’s confusing to Americans. And actually, I think particularly in this very polarized environment, he kind of got boxed out to his right in Britain. We didn’t bring this up with him, but GB News a sort of a further right, more nationalist platform boxing him out because in some ways, I think his heart ultimately beats on the left. He comes from, as you said, The Mirror.
And he’s, I think in a way Chris Cuomo was sort of a poor man’s Pierce Morgan in terms of like I’m angry about stuff, I’m reacting to things, but I’m politically a little hard to pin down. And I think there, in terms of US domestic politics, a lot of people who like that but there are also limits because we’re so polarized. And I think a lot of Americans would like to know, are you on my team or not? And Piers is pretty hard to pin down that way.

Meera Pattni: Look, I’m sure he’s going to get his interview with the president. I’m sure that’s coming to a YouTube episode near us. And yeah, a fascinating conversation.

Ben Smith: Yeah, thanks for joining me, Meera.

Meera Pattni: Of course.

Ben Smith: Going to have to have you back.

Meera Pattni: Let’s just say to Max that he doesn’t have to come back next week. Let’s give him two weeks off.

Ben Smith: This is like a Lou Gehrig, Wally Pipp situation. I’ll let some American explain that to you.

Meera Pattni: Oh, God. Is it baseball?

Ben Smith: It’s baseball.

Meera Pattni: Well, that’s it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Toomey, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zirn, and Tori Kuhr. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby.

Ben Smith: Our public editor is Chris Balfe. And special thank you this week to The Boston Globe and to James Pindell for letting me use this office.

Meera Pattni: If you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to review us.

Ben Smith: And if you want more media news this week without Max Tani, you can always sign up for Semafor’s media newsletter, out every Sunday night with a large number of scoops.