The Relentless Promotion Of Piers Morgan

There’s no soft launch for Piers Morgan. The British import who takes over CNN’s 9 o’clock hour–recently vacated after 20 years by Larry King–hits the ground running tonight after weeks of rampant and relentless promotion, by CNN and by the host himself.

Judging by the morning papers, the promotional juggernaut behind tonight’s debut of Piers Morgan Tonight is fitting: it’s everywhere. It’s also revealing: the host wants your attention, but seems far less interested in whether you like him or not.

As Brian Stelter writes in The New York Times:

Mr. Morgan is an unstoppable self-promoter, the likes of which CNN has not seen before. On his office bulletin board hangs a headline from The New York Post: “Piers makes enemy of Madonna.” Before dozens of television critics this month, he said CNN needs to make noise in a cable news “jungle,” and added of his own show, “I want you guys to be writing about the show regularly, good, bad and ugly.”

Stelter notes Morgan’s seemingly round-the-clock usage of Twitter–he reports Morgan sent a DM suggesting the Times interview him for a story–all part of the PR push; answering messages from the famous and unknown, the fawning and the harsh.

Polly Graham, a former “3 a.m. girl” at the Daily Mirror, describes Morgan as “massively egotistical but (he’s) endearing with it.” So much so, Morgan tells the UK Independent nobody who watches PMT will go away bored. “You love it or hate it,” he has said, before adding, cheerfully, that those who hate it will consider him to be a “ludicrous, arrogant twat”.

“Ludicrous, arrogant twat” is not the way most CNN hosts, past or present, would ever describe themselves–even jokingly or off the record. And surely few would throw as much of themselves into the uber-risky proposition of turning around the network’s ailing primetime. But Morgan wants neither an off-Broadway warmup nor a face-saving exit. He seems focused exclusively on winning–and using his own love ’em or hate ’em personality to do the dirty, retail hand-shaking (and tweeting) to bring that victory off. It’s not a stretch to draw parallels to Bill Clinton circa 1992.

Writing in the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead attempts today to dissect the secrets of Morgan’s success. She says part of it–as American viewers will see tonight–comes from his reported brilliance as an interviewer: fearless, informed, provocative. But it’s more than that:

But his real talent, I suspect, is for being a lot cleverer and more serious than he often cares to appear, while having a greater gift for fun than almost anyone I’ve met.

That may be the kind of quality that translates through the screen and brings viewers back night after night. Even if they find him to be ludicrous, arrogant, or twat-like. At the very least, the era of Larry King Live celeb-friendly softball interviews appears over, as the New York Post describes in an “exclusive” interview today. (Exclusive in what sense, Posties? The guy’s talking to everybody–even me, for heaven’s sake). Morgan seems set, the Post reports, on making Barbara Walters cry:

“I’m going to make her cry,” Morgan predicted. “I am.”
“They’ll hate you even more,” one producer joked.
“No, they’ll love me,” Morgan said. “They’ll love me if I make her cry — if I make her cry for the right reasons.”