In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, former CNN host Piers Morgan says he has no hard feelings toward his former network. He’s also got advice for network President Jeff Zucker.
“I’ve never looked back, because I never feel negative,” Morgan said in his first interview since leaving the network in September. “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.”
In the interview, Morgan tells a different story about the terms of his departure.
Morgan says, Zucker offered him an opportunity to do a show that would air 20 times a year, but Morgan declined because Zucker wouldn’t let him co-produce it and hire his own staff. (High-level sources at CNN tell a different story: Morgan was pretty much done in March, when the show was terminated due to poor ratings, but he stayed through September because he was on contract.) During the interview at his home here, Morgan says the offer was “completely, 100 percent on the table. Unequivocally. You can have that on the record.”
For Q3 2014, CNN’s 9pmET hour, which featured an both an extended hour of “Anderson Cooper 360” and original series, was up +3% in viewers and up +21% in the A25-54 demo year-over-year compared to “Piers Morgan Live,” which aired during the third quarter of 2013.