John Harris: Goodbye to the age of rage: why Piers Morgan’s outrage journalism is flopping
TalkTV is in trouble. Despite the millions Rupert Murdoch has invested in his newly launched television channel, and the supposedly magnetic presence of Piers Morgan, its numbers have sometimes been so low that the official broadcasting rating agency has not registered a single viewer. Last Wednesday, Piers Morgan Uncensored, the nightly showcase of debate and un-woke opinions intended to be TalkTV’s centrepiece, was said to have attracted 24,000 people, and then lost over half of them, leaving it with an estimated audience of 10,000.
Over at GB News, the similarly right-inclined talk-based outlet that has survived its equally disastrous launch, it was presumably pints of bitter and sausage rolls all round: that night its competing offering – hosted by the somewhat niche Canadian pundit Mark Steyn – reportedly won the ratings battle with a princely initial viewing figure of 54,000.
It was for research rather than recreation that I watched Morgan’s show that night. It was an underwhelming experience: a very long hour of the host affecting to be what Noel Gallagher once memorably termed “a man with a fork in a world of soup”, fuming about everything from the governor of the Bank of England (who is “running around like a … hyperbolic headless chicken”) to an unnamed police officer who had allegedly refused to work outside office hours.
Over at GB News, the similarly right-inclined talk-based outlet that has survived its equally disastrous launch, it was presumably pints of bitter and sausage rolls all round: that night its competing offering – hosted by the somewhat niche Canadian pundit Mark Steyn – reportedly won the ratings battle with a princely initial viewing figure of 54,000.
It was for research rather than recreation that I watched Morgan’s show that night. It was an underwhelming experience: a very long hour of the host affecting to be what Noel Gallagher once memorably termed “a man with a fork in a world of soup”, fuming about everything from the governor of the Bank of England (who is “running around like a … hyperbolic headless chicken”) to an unnamed police officer who had allegedly refused to work outside office hours.
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