Adam Boulton Diary – My friend Piers Morgan, great TV walk outs and the danger of opinionated news
Live on air walkouts have produced some classic television. My first experience of a walkout was by Denis Healey on Breakfast television and I wasn’t even asking the questions. He took exception to an enquiry from my colleague, Anne Diamond ,about his wife’s private medical treatment. The then Shadow Foreign Secretary stood up, dragging the sofa with him by his mike cable, bellowing “You’re a s***, and you’re a s*** and TV-am’s s***.” Cut to commercial break. Then he punched me. This was in front of the next guest, the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, so there was no chance of keeping it out of the papers.
More recently Robin Boardman-Pattinson, a besuited young gentleman representing Extinction Rebellion stormed out of my studio when I suggested that it was perhaps indulgent and incompetent to blockade parliament when MPs were away on recess.
Traditionally the interviewee walks out because they don’t like what the interviewer, or a rival guest, is saying. To be fair, interviewers, including me, may sometimes be unfairly provocative. Barry Gibb can hardly be blamed for walking out after Clive Anderson told him the Bee Gees “will always be Les Tossers to me.”
With his flair for a good story, it was the other way round, “man bites dog”, when the TV presenter Piers Morgan stomped out of his own show shouting, “OK I’m done with this!”. It turns out that he was leaving his presenter’s chair on ITV’s Good Morning Britainfor good.
Piers bounced back the next morning, the centre of attention as he entertained the reporters crowding his Kensington doorstep. He insisted that he would not be denied his right to free speech to call Meghan a liar and that “the woke crowd won’t cancel me”. Piers has already written a book Wake Up! attacking wokeness. There is widespread speculation that he may find a new berth at one of the two centre-right opinionated news services, GB News and UK TV, which have recently been licenced by Ofcom. As a veteran of the Sun and the News of the World, News Ltd’s UK TV looks like the more comfortable fit for him.
My friend Piers Morgan is a very talented journalist and a kind and generous man in his private life. Any believer in free speech must welcome new competitors in the news marketplace. Yet together these two developments are part of an unwelcome trend in UK journalism. Opinion – which frankly is for the birds – is trumping the reporting of facts, and the objective analysis of them, which seem to me to be the only constructive functions of journalism.
Piers is morphing from being a journalist into a celebrity. Good luck to him. It is a profitable transformation; he has suggested that he earns some £20 million a year in total. It may also be the reason why GMB was able to dispense with his services even as, with the tweet “My job is done”, he celebrated ITV’s breakfast offering rating higher than the BBC – for the first time since the heyday of TV-am. In the face of competition from new opinion-led news services, the existing mainstream broadcasters need to polish up their credentials as impartial servants of the general public. Now Morgan is ceasing to be a face of the channel it will be interesting to see what happens to his two other popular strands on ITV, Life Stories and his interviews with American murderers.
Digital technology makes it easy and cheap to join “the media” these days. As choices expand, so audiences’ fragment. In the absence of a BBC, Fox News Channel has shown that it is possible to make billions of dollars profit in the US with a relatively small share of overall viewing, thanks to advertising and bundled subscriptions. The services funded by the licence fee make survival by subscription support more difficult in the UK, although it has worked for Sky and for some quality news sources such as The Times and Financial Times. Commercial radio and television rely on advertising.
Whether BBC or independent, proper news services thrive as part of a big media operations which also offer entertainment and sport coverage. The BBC, ITV News and Sky News are all major international news gatherers. These companies spend many tens of millions of pounds getting the pictures and the voices by maintaining expert producers, reporters and camera teams across the country and around the world. Increasingly in-depth news reporting also requires specialists who understand how to decode and communicate data. Piers could only have his moment after CBS, ITV and Oprah’s Harpo went to the trouble of securing an on the record interview with Harry and Meghan.
In comparison blowing off opinions is child’s play, grabbing headlines by substituting emotion for information. Britain’s mainstream news broadcasters strive to avoid culture war by reporting from many sides of an issue. They don’t and shouldn’t take sides, which is precisely what is antagonizing Piers Morgan and the founders of the new generation of “news” services.
Andrew Neil, one of the founders of GB News and, by the way, the boss who hired me for Sky News, accuses the existing news services of being “woke…out of touch with the majority… too metropolitan, too southern, too middle class”. GB News, he says, will not provide rolling news coverage, instead “we will build a community with programmes led by journalists and commentators with warmth, character, knowledge and, yes, at times, some edge.”
We shall see. For all the talk of being “diverse” the presenters hired so far – Michelle Dewberry, Inaya Folarin Iman, Colin Brazier, Dan Wooton and Alexandra Phillips – all seem drawn from a similar strand of Brexity conservatism with a small c. Consumers of the Sun, Telegraph, Mail, Spectator, LBC and news reviews on the mainstream media may wonder if such opinions really are “left out and unheard” as claimed.
Piers Morgan’s former colleague at CNN in the US, the distinguished reporter Jake Tapper tweeted in his support: “This is what happens when you live in a country where there is no first amendment. Insanity”. Tapper should be commended for his loyalty, but he seems unclear on what went on. It would be a scandal if Morgan had been sacked for what he said or because the Duchess complained about him. Instead, it seems he went not for what he said but because he, as a leading UK TV presenter, crossed the line and said it on a news programme. That is against the rules and explains why Ofcom received 41,000 complaints. As the BBC presenter Clive Myrie noted after delivering this year’s Harold Evans lecture: “[Piers] has been flexing the guardrails when it comes to fairness and impartiality, but the guardrails ultimately are there.”
We have been here before. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”, was the ratings boosting outburst of Howard Beale, the fading newsreader in Network, the 1976 satirical film by Paddy Chayevsky and Sidney Lumet, recently re-imagined with Brian Cranston at the National Theatre.
As for me, I know where I stand. I’m not mad and I’m going to keep on taking it. I hope that I can look forward to the occasional interviewee storming out on me in the future. They should be the story not me.