NY Times blames Piers Morgan’s sacking on insular Americans – but Brits loathe him as well

I very occasionally use the acronym CAUC when referring to public figures who haven’t endeared themselves to me, and several people have asked me what it means. Well, roughly speaking, it means Piers Morgan. If you’re wondering why celebratory beacons have been lit on hill-tops from Land’s End to John O’Groats, CNN has announced that it’s cancelling Morgan’s abysmal talk show after ratings hit an all-time low this month. (Several editions attracted fewer viewers than we used to get for Midnight Hour, the obscure BBC Two politics programme I edited between 1995 and 1997, whose annual budget, adjusted for inflation, probably wouldn’t have paid for a single broadcast of Morgan’s ghastly gab-fest.)

That left-liberal Bible, the New York Times, knows exactly who to blame for Morgan’s demise:

It’s been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who refuses to assimilate — the only football he cares about is round and his lectures on guns were rife with contempt — and a CNN audience that is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America. (full report)

See? It’s the insularity of American hicks which is to blame for Morgan being sacked. If only he’d sucked up to them a bit more by taking an interest in the kind of things which obsess those peculiar narrow-minded hayseeds who, for some odd reason, are “deeply interested in America”, they’d have clasped him to their unsophisticated, Constitution and gun-lovin’ bosoms.

The simple fact is that appointing a vulgar, jeering, loutish, insensitive boor was a mistake. It wasn’t so much Morgan’s Britishness per se that was the problem – it was the type of Britishness he represents. Auberon Waugh would not doubt have dubbed Morgan a NewBrit – i.e. a rich, dodgy, brash, tasteless, classless, cultureless, "success"-worshipping, New Labour Neocon with absolutely no regard for history, tradition or decorum. (Funny to think that these are the very traits often ascribed - unfairly - to Americans by the snootier sort of Guardian reader.)

Of course, Morgan’s impending dismissal is a cause for rejoicing. But the downside is that the blister will have even more time to spend on British TV, which, to its eternal shame, already regularly features him interviewing meaningless trash-culture icons. Still, at least there’s a chance this particular CAUC won’t be embarrassing us abroad for a little while.