“Piers Morgan Uncensored” is the Death of the Soul

During Donald Trump’s first — but perhaps by no means last — term in office, there was a passing online trend called “Internet Bloodsports”. The concept was simple. YouTubers invited people onto their shows who had extremely different opinions and encouraged them to scream at one another about how they were stupid, evil, cuckolds et cetera.

This formula has since been adopted by the journalist and broadcaster Piers Morgan.

Piers Morgan, for the uninitiated, is an appalling sociopath. I don’t say that lightly. You’ll often find me insulting people’s work but you’ll rarely find me insulting people. Morgan, though, deserves insults, because he is an insult — an insult to Western civilisation.

Morgan launched his career in the papers, editing the Daily Mirror until he was sacked for publishing photos of British soldiers “torturing” people that turned out to be fake. With no charm or wit, and the perpetual expression of a teenager who just farted in class, he was a natural for TV. Morgan was a judge on America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent, which must have been galling for contestants — like being judged on Dragon’s Den by Elizabeth Holmes.

Eventually, Morgan began to present his own TV shows, hosting Piers Morgan Live in the US, in which the Englishman inexplicably lectured Americans. (He was a case study in my 2022 article arguing that the Yanks might need a wall on the Eastern Seaboard.) In the UK, he presented Good Morning Britain — a breakfast show for absolute masochists. He then launched Piers Morgan Uncensored on TalkTV. (It has now shifted to YouTube.)

Piers Morgan Uncensored is so nightmarish that it would defy the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. When it launched, I wrote:

Morgan seems to be annoyed about everything (a common trait among the annoying). His show begins with an absurdly bombastic introduction, featuring martial music, The Day Today-esque graphics and big words like “WOKE INSANITY”, “SNOWFLAKE SOCIETY”, “CANCEL CULTURE” and “THE WORLD’S GONE NUTS”. It’s like a man ate a copy of The Daily Express and puked it out across the screen.

Then Morgan complains. He complains about Trump. He complains about Johnson. He complains about trans activists. He complains about the Kardashians. He complains in the same colourless, stentorian style about everything, draining all sense of perspective and making one feel as if the end of the world would be on par with Prince William being booed at a football match.

Well, one thing I’ll give Morgan is that he has a canny sense of what people want to see. At some point he must have realised that viewers of Piers Morgan Uncensored were getting a bit too much Piers Morgan. He began inviting on more guests, and the most inflammatory guests he could find.

Morgan’s favourite formula is an elegant one — he takes a divisive subject and then invites the most obnoxious representatives of each side to argue about it. Hosting a debate on Israel and Palestine, for example, he hosts the oleaginous Alan Dershowitz and the boorish Mohammed Hijab. The chance of either man articulating a thoughtful point on the conflict are as significant as the chances of either man transmuting into an ostrich.

Most offensively, Morgan behaves as if he’s actually interested in the truth. “What I’d like this to be is a civilised debate,” he says. This is like hiring a prostitute and then claiming that you actually wanted a romantic date.

Look at the thumbnail of an average Morgan video and you’ll find a trio of demagogues with the mouths hanging open like howler monkeys, while Morgan huffs at the side as if he just can’t believe that his discussion forum has been violated. Never mind that this is a host so juvenile that he gobbled steak in front of a vegan activist — a stunt that didn’t even have a meaningful payoff because the vegan activist barely reacted.

When he isn’t overseeing turd-flinging contests, Morgan likes to have on viral personalities. He has interviewed Andrew Tate several times, for example. “With characters like this,” Morgan says, “The more light shone on them, the better.” Yes, I’m sure thousands of viewers had their opinion of the former online porn baron and alleged sex criminal changed by Morgan’s ruthless questioning, and that tens of millions of views for Morgan were just a happy by-product. And thank God he “shone light” on the unhinged performance artist “Crackhead Barney”. There, truly, Morgan found his intellectual equal.

There is a nuance I should add to this piece. The antithesis Piers Morgan Uncensored is a calm, genteel, sophisticated programme in which people with broadly similar opinions about the world smugly inhabit the centre of acceptable politics. The antithesis of Piers Morgan Uncensored, in other words, is The Rest Is Politics.

That’s no good at all.

But the problem with Piers Morgan Uncensored is that it opens the Overton window and releases so much gas that you can’t see through it. There’s no point in airing alternative viewpoints if they are as smart as a disorientated wasp.

You aren’t meant to think, here. You’re meant to have an emotional reaction. And that emotional reaction is so crude and so base that it dulls the heart as well as the brain. You stop feeling, as well as thinking, and react on pure instinct.

This month, a young influencer named Jack Doherty crashed his $200,000 car on camera after checking his phone while allegedly speeding. How can young people watch this sort of trash, I asked myself. Well, Piers Morgan Uncensored is the equivalent of that car crash but for adults. It is morally worse because it has pretensions. It turns one of the most appalling bloodbaths of this century, for example, into a kind of low farce. I have a morbid mind. I’ve written about deathmatch wrestling and drill rap. But I’ve never seen anything as morbid as this.

It would be a mistake to idealise the days when Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley, Jr. could debate on Firing Line — which, of course, did so much to stop the Vietnam War — but it remains undeniable that we have regressed. Piers Morgan Uncensored is not just bad TV. It is not just bad journalism. It is the death of civilisation. It is the death of the soul.