The Media Continue to Circle Around Piers Morgan…
In a semi-must read, The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren A. E. Schuker and Paul Sonne write about Piers Morgan in the wake of the NotW scandal. Notable sections…
Two people close to CNN say that there has been ongoing discussion about the situation internally at the network, and Mr. Morgan has repeatedly reassured executives that he never hacked a phone or did anything illegal.
And this describing the “background check” the network ran on him.
Before signing him, CNN executives carefully read his books and thoroughly questioned him about his journalistic habits and ethics, a person close to the network said. A lot of the questioning, this person said, surrounded not telephone-hacking practices but Mr. Morgan’s firing from the Mirror in 2004, after he authorized the newspaper’s publication of photographs showing Iraqis being abused by British soldiers that the British army alleged were fakes.
Since CNN was hiring Mr. Morgan to host an interview show, rather than cover breaking news, the discussion focused on Mr. Morgan’s methods for booking guests for the show. CNN wanted to ensure that Mr. Morgan would never pay for interviews, this person said, and were satisfied with his answers.
“He wasn’t hired to be a news anchor or correspondent; he was being hired as a personality—that dictated the standards,” a person close to the network said. “He came off as a guy who had been chastened by his past and as someone who had the intelligence to grow and learn from it,” this person added.
Inside Cable News 
July 31, 2011 at 9:33 pm
What would CNN do if Morgan had to be dumped? Repeat Erin Burnett’s upcoming show?
Morgan may come from the seedy world of British tabloid journalism, but I doubt CNN would dump him after all the huff they made over hiring him, of course that was mostly under the now deposed Jon Klein.
July 31, 2011 at 9:46 pm
It’s a different world over. Personally, I don’t care what he did or how he did it when he worked in the U.K. If he is found to have been paying for guests while working at CNN or doing anything else unseemly, then it’ll matter. Until he does, leave him alone.
July 31, 2011 at 10:15 pm
I don’t care if he hacked a celebrity’s phone (I don’t care that NOTW did, either), but if he was in on the “dead people’s phones” thing..outta there.
July 31, 2011 at 10:53 pm
I find it odd that many people differentiate the privacy rights of a celebrity from that of a dead girl. It’s the same law being violated and if one is done it’s no great leap to do that to anyone else.
If Mr. Morgan is found to have been involved CNN will have to dump him. It could be true because this is about tabloid journalism, after all, and I doubt anyone would be much surprised to learn that National Enquirer used such methods on this side of the Pond.
Following that same logic, however, it is equally plausible that the entire Morgan angle is a load of crap designed to take some of the focus off off NoTW – it’s no longer a “NewsCorp” scandal if “everyone does it.” Eh?
July 31, 2011 at 11:13 pm
The same flexible ethics that allow you to do it to a celebrity, eventually break-down whatever morality you have left. Pretty soon, anyone with the misfortune of being a newsmaker seems fair game. Might be why the law doesn’t make it okay if you only do it to this group of people.
July 31, 2011 at 11:34 pm
^ The basis for the 14th Amendment’s …nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
August 1, 2011 at 12:01 am
I understand the idea of what ‘people’ will get upset about, but that’s the problem. We keep moving further and further in a direction of “You can do this, but you can’t do that“. People try to stay in line with the current morality, but the line keeps moving. I like Piers for some stupid reason, but I wouldn’t seeing an example made. If he’s, you know, guilty of something.
August 1, 2011 at 12:03 am
I find it odd that many people differentiate the privacy rights of a celebrity from that of a dead girl.
I don’t differentiate the rights, I differentiate the punishment based on how egregiously those rights have been violated. Being a member of sleazy tabloid journalism is nothing to be proud of, and in spite of the fact that I like Piers on CNN, I don’t like the world he came from. That said, if he hacked a celebrity’s phone, I’ll get over it. If he did it it to terror and war victims, or a missing little girl..game over.
August 1, 2011 at 6:47 am
I don’t know a ton about this stuff but it’s always seemed to me that all aspects of the media in the UK operate from a different set of standards than the media over here.
I just don’t care what he did in Britain. Wake me up when he does something stupid over here. Besides, how many people are actually following this story? About 37? If CNN canned him, 98% of the people who have heard of Piers Morgan would be dumbfounded as to why he was fired. I think they’d be surprised to learn that he was potentially involved in anything across the pond and I don’t think they’d care if he was.
August 1, 2011 at 8:20 pm
People try to stay in line with the current morality, but the line keeps moving.
You are exactly right. It is because people have become so used to learning leaked information about celebrities that they aren’t outraged at their being violated…. even though, it seems, celebrities are often the ones with a most precarious hold on life. Eventually the morality erodes until nothing shocks us.
—————
media in the UK operate from a different set of standards than the media over here
Maybe. Or it could be that such below-the-radar practices commonplace. Even police officers sometimes resort to not-quite-kosher methods of fact-finding to break a case and private investigators aren’t hampered by the rules of obtaining criminal convictions. I wonder how many American tabloids have private eyes on retainer.