Across several banks of screens in a small TV production control room, a group of American pundits are screaming at each other. It’s a Monday afternoon in mid-November and, naturally, the topic is the election. “That’s me playing the world’s smallest violin for all these crying Democrats!” hollers a red-faced Vincent Oshana, a right-leaning comedian. Shortly after, The Young Turks co-creator Cenk Uygur loudly tells pollster Allan Lichtman that he was “stupidly wrong” for forecasting a Democratic victory and “deserves a tall glass of shut-up juice!”
It could be any angry, spittle-flecked political chat show on cable TV. But while the talking heads are beaming in from around the U.S., the entire operation is being orchestrated out of London. And the host and self-proclaimed “ringmaster” — setting the topics, occasionally goading his guests and sitting back to let sparks fly — is Piers Morgan, one of the most recognizable and controversial figures in British media.
Morgan has big plans for his YouTube show, “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” currently run out of the so-called “News Building”— the 17-story office block near The Shard skyscraper that houses Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. empire (including The Sun and The Times). Most notably, Morgan hopes “Uncensored” will be the forum for an interview pairing Donald Trump with Elon Musk, the billionaire turned presidential wingman. “Maybe interviewing Trump and Elon together at the White House would be good,” Morgan says from his dressing room ahead of the recordings featuring Oshana and Uygur (two of three debate segments filmed that afternoon). Trump and Musk have agreed, in principle, to come on “Uncensored,” he claims, although “no dates have been set.”
Trump has been interviewed by Morgan before, most recently in early 2022 as the first guest on “Uncensored.” At the time, the show was a major part of the launch of TalkTV, Murdoch’s attempt to bring a Fox News-style network to the U.K. and was widely promoted as a big get. However, the interview didn’t go well, as Trump walked off when pressed about losing the 2020 election. Trump later claimed the footage was doctored — putting out a statement describing Morgan as part of the “fake news media” (of course) — and audio released by his team appeared to bolster his assertion.
Things didn’t go well for TalkTV, either. Last April, the network shut down after suffering terrible ratings and a $110 million loss. Just weeks earlier, “Uncensored,” seeing where things were heading, had already pivoted to YouTube.
Since then, the show has been unburdened by the constraints of TV, hosting fiery debates and newsy interviews that last much longer than the 47 minutes Morgan had available before he made the switch online. Morgan’s unquestionable skills as an interviewer and his impressive rolodex have helped the show book buzzy guests like Kevin Spacey, Armie Hammer and Fiona Harvey (the supposed real-life Martha from Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer”), all of which have raised “Uncensored’s” profile. Harvey’s appearance was a major scoop, amassing 15 million YouTube views and debuting just before she filed a $170 million defamation lawsuit against the streamer. “It was actually a lawyer we’d had on the show before who said he wanted to represent her,” says Morgan. “I suspect she’ll end up with a big check.”
Trump and Musk, together in the White House, would undoubtedly top Harvey when it comes to viewership. Morgan loves to brag about how many people are watching his show — not that he can lie about the numbers as they’re literally presented and updated live under each video. “We just got two million from the last piece of content; before that a million, a million, two million, two million, one-and-a-half million, nearly four-and-a-half million, a million, a million,” he says. “I can’t think of anyone in the world on YouTube — other than Joe Rogan — in the news, interview, opinion space getting numbers like that.”
Piers Morgan with his guest Fiona Harvey on “Piers Morgan Uncensored”
Newscorp
Morgan often exhibits a preening self-regard (he’s speaking from a room where the walls are plastered with framed newspaper and magazine covers, many featuring his face), but there’s a good reason he feels the need for chest beating — “Uncensored” is something he claims he’s “basically bet [his] personal bank on.”
It’s also the latest reinvention for the 59-year-old, who has somehow managed to repeatedly rise from the ashes of disgrace and defeat. Fired as editor of British tabloid The Mirror for printing fake Iraq War photos (a period that also embroiled him in the phone-hacking scandal), Morgan moved to TV, where he later saw “Piers Morgan Live,” CNN’s replacement for “Larry King Live,” canceled after three years over poor ratings. Most recently, he quit before getting pushed out as co-host on ITV’s flagship breakfast show “Good Morning Britain” amidst a backlash over his scathing criticism of Meghan Markle. That episode — in which he said he “didn’t believe a word” the Duchess of Sussex said in her bombshell 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey about experiencing racism from within the royal family (and famously stormed off set when challenged on-air by a colleague) — for many looked like it could be his last.
In typically Morgan fashion, he now says it was “arguably the best day of my career.” Indeed, six months after the incident, Murdoch made him the star signing of TalkTV, rewarding Morgan with a three-year contract reportedly worth more than $60 million. If true, the deal made him the highest paid journalist in the U.K. (he says he’d “be annoyed” if that wasn’t the case).
But with that deal now having concluded, he’s taken it all on himself. Since Jan. 1, Wake Up Productions, Morgan’s production company, has been the owner of the entire “Uncensored” business, taking it out of Murdoch’s empire. No money changed hands during the acquisition. As payment for the YouTube channel and all existing content, News UK will simply take a cut of its ad revenues until 2029. Morgan is now his own master.
Although less dramatic, Morgan’s Teflon-like endurance parallels Trump’s. And it’s Trump who is now giving Morgan cause to be extra bullish about his re-emergence as an internet star. “The election was the vindication that I made the right call,” Morgan says of his pivot to digital media. “YouTube was the place that most people watched the coverage. They beat cable and broadcast — that was a real gamechanger.”
The stats back Morgan up. According to YouTube, more than 45 million people in the U.S. watched election-related content on the platform on Nov. 5, while Nielsen said that an average of 42.29 million viewers were watching across 18 cable and broadcast networks.
As is now widely acknowledged, it wasn’t just the Democrats that lost the election. Almost all traditional pundits got the outcome wrong, and the subsequent audience exodus from legacy media to podcasts, YouTube, and other alternative sources has accelerated. Trump’s appearance on Rogan’s podcast, listened to and watched by more than 40 million people in the days before Nov. 5, is cited as the most decisive moment of his campaign. It’s one Morgan describes as “very clever — there’s no network or cable equivalent to anything like that scale.”
Morgan says he’s made up with the returning president — who he’s known since he won the celebrity edition of “The Apprentice” in 2008 — following their 2022 “spat.” It was Trump who called “to bury the hatchet. It was like nothing had happened.”
That was prior to the election, and Morgan says he told Trump he “was convinced he was going to win.” They spoke again before Nov. 5 – Morgan had told Fox News that Trump had “balls of steel” following the assassination attempt, and Trump had called him. (“He loved all that,” says Morgan, “so he rang me.”) And then they spoke the morning of Nov. 6. “Even he was stunned by the scale of the win,” Morgan says.
But now that Trump is heading back to the White House, is he no longer the “dangerous, deluded, despicable lunatic” that Morgan wrote about in The Daily Mail on Jan. 7, 2021, after the attack on the Capitol, and someone who “must be removed from office as soon as possible”?
Morgan admits he’s “blown hot and cold with Trump,” and that now things are warming up again. “There are lots of qualities about Trump I really admire,” Morgan says. “And although I thought that was it for him after Jan. 6 — and that it should have been it for him – you can’t help but admire the comeback. He’s proved me wrong, and he’s proved a lot of people wrong.”
Morgan won the 2008 edition of “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
©NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Morgan knows full well that being in Trump’s good graces as he returns to power is beneficial for “Uncensored,” which the host sees as being a major player in a new-media landscape that’s packed with MAGA-leaning commentators. Rogan looms largest among them, but some of the other hosts now plying their opinionated trade on YouTube include Ben Shapiro, Meghan Kelly and Tucker Carlson. Like Morgan, many of them became famous on cable news and TV. With the exception of Rogan, Morgan says none of those other figures top his popularity. “You can go and check yourself, but I think we’re No. 2,” Morgan says.
Rogan is someone Morgan — a self-declared woke-hating liberal — compares himself to. “People don’t really know what his politics are,” he says. “They can’t really work him out, so they try and park him into the far right, which is bullshit. He’s not even really a conservative. He’s been a Bernie Sanders fan, so he’s a complicated character. I’m the same.”
A man with less complicated political opinions is the conservative pundit Shapiro, whose Daily Wire empire Morgan now hopes to emulate with live shows, books, documentaries, feature films and merchandise. “The money the Daily Wire makes from things like hair gel is unbelievable — they make millions!” Morgan too is willing to hawk hair products to make a profit. “There’s no area of merchandising I wouldn’t be interested in,” he insists.
This is the future as legacy media becomes marginalized, he declares. “Big opinion-led people, like me, who have big YouTube followings and big sales and marketing teams. I want to build a proper media brand business — I don’t just want to be a talent for hire anymore.”
And now, for the first time since the start of his career almost 40 years ago, Morgan isn’t.
“It’s a bit of a gamble,” he says about no longer being on News Corp’s lucrative payroll and going it alone, speaking following the news that he’d taken ownership of “Uncensored.” “But I think it’s quite a measured gamble in the sense that we’re not a startup. We started this two-and-a-half years ago.”
There were “friendly discussions” about keeping “Uncensored” as part of News UK before his three-year contract drew to a close in December, he claims. “The bottom line was, they would have preferred a structure where I had a talent fee arrangement,” he says. “But that just wasn’t something I wanted to do anymore. Ultimately, I said, ‘Look, I just want to go off and I want to build my own thing.’ I want this genuinely to become the biggest YouTube channel in the news, debate, opinion and interview space in the world. And I think we’ve got a very good chance.”
Perhaps it’s his hatred of “cancel culture” that’s made Morgan open to welcoming contentious figures to “Uncensored.” “I like to give those people platforms, because I think it’s ridiculous that we ban them for life,” he says. “I don’t like this very intransigent society that’s developed where you get destroyed and that’s it.”
It also helps that many of these interviews have been widely seen. For the likes of Kevin Spacey (2.9 million views) and Armie Hammer (2.2 million), who Morgan says have been “canceled without ever committing a crime,” he’s happy for “Uncensored” to “be a part of their redemption arc.” Months after appearing on the show, Hammer landed his first role in the three years since sexual assault allegations broke.
Morgan with Armie Hammer
Newscorp
But there have been concerns over Morgan’s choice of guests. Harvey’s appearance was described by The Guardian as “grubby exploitation” and “gleefully parading a mentally ill woman around.” Morgan pushes back. “I think she was perfectly entitled to have her say and she was perfectly happy with the way that interview went.”
And there have been interviews that even he admits have gone too far. In October, Morgan apologized after platforming “totally false” claims about Jay-Z and Beyonce made by Jaguar Wright in an interview about Sean Combs’ arrest. A month later, Morgan called time on an interview with Dan Bilzerian after the former playboy-lifestyle-touting influencer went from condemning Israel’s war with Gaza into out-and-out antisemitism, suggesting “Jewish supremacy” was the “greatest threat to the world.”
Morgan was taken aback by Bilzerien’s claims (“He just started going nuts”), but there are questions over why he’d platform him in the first place. Morgan defends his choice. “We performed a valuable public service in exposing what he’s really like,” he says, adding that he’s got “no interest in fueling rage bait for the sake of rage bait.” The Bilzerian interview currently sits at 2.4 million views.
Provocation is “Uncensored’s” core offering, but it’s something that Morgan is trying to tone down on his other social media. He jokingly claims he’s been having “Twitter anger-management lessons,” and while he’s not immune from making the occasional unpleasant jibe, his routine online sparring sessions are a thing of the past. “I’m a bit calmer and more judicious,” he says.
There are also fewer postings about the activities of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, once a constant target for his contempt. “I’ve just run out of interest in them, as most people have,” he says. “I think people are genuinely bored with it all. They’ve just disappeared into obscurity. And when you trash your family for years, you just run out of things to say. It’s over.”
If that’s true, would he still have them on his show if the opportunity arose?
“Meghan and Harry uncensored?” he says, clicks clearly in his sights. “Bring it on!”
