Shots Fired…

Politico’s Dylan Byers interviews Piers Morgan…

“I’ve always felt that CNN should be more resilient to media criticism about monthly or quarterly ratings,” Morgan says. “Ted Turner once described CNN to me as The New York Times of television. We don’t care about chasing ratings or chasing readers. We care about having a brand that is so trusted that whenever anything important happens in the world, people turn us on.

“If I was running CNN, if I was Jeff Zucker, I would come out and do an interview with someone like you, and I would say, ‘I’m not going to discuss ratings again,’” Morgan continues. “Our business proposition is not predicated on ratings, our global brand is not dependent on how we rate at 9 p.m. in America.”

Zucker won’t actually say that, of course, because “everyone would probably perceive it as him looking weak.”

The old ICN doesn’t exist any more. But if it did I would be pointing out right here that I made the exact same argument years ago…

And then there’s this…

“Could I have done with a better lead-in? Yes,” Morgan says. “Anderson is a great field reporter, but does he drive big ratings at CNN, outside of a big news cycle? I don’t see any evidence of it. And yet the whole bank was being bet on him at 8 and 10 o’clock.

“I never bought into that as my best way of getting ratings” he continues. “You look over at Megyn Kelly on Fox News and she’s inheriting 450,000 or 500,000 from Bill O’Reilly in the [25-to-54-year-old] demo, and some days I’d be getting 60,000. That’s not to denigrate Anderson so much, because I think he’s pretty good at what he does. But was he the golden boy everybody thought he was? I didn’t see much evidence of that in ratings.”

(Morgan says he and Cooper “were never the easiest of bedfellows.” Cooper was “just a totally different character than me,” he says, “and we never really clicked.”)