If you’re a douche long enough people will tire of you, which is something Piers Morgan just learned:
CNN has given up on trying to make Piers Morgan the new Larry King after a three-year run and will pull the plug on the Briton’s 9 p.m. talk show, which has been finishing far behind rivals Meghan Kelly on Fox News Channel and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.
According to Nielsen ratings from last week, “Piers Morgan Live” was seen nightly by just 270,000 viewers nationwide and only 50,000 people in the key advertising demographic of Americans ages 25 to 54. Ms. Kelly and Ms. Maddow had, respectively, audiences of more than 2 million and 900,000 overall and more than 350,000 and 220,000 in that key 25 to 54 age group.
Not surprisingly one of the hypothesized reasons for Morgan’s low ratings is his constant banging on the gun control drum:
Conservatives especially took offense at his British-tabloid persona and his overt support for gun control, and they started a petition at the White House’s “We the People” site demanding that the administration “Deport British Citizen Piers Morgan for Attacking 2nd Amendment.”
Personally I just find Morgan to be a disagreeable person in general. He has always come off as a smug asshole to me and that alone was enough for me not to like the guy. I don’t watch CNN (or much television in general) so it doesn’t matter much to me that his show was cancelled but I certainly am not going to lose any sleep over it.
Given that the highest rated show he has had in quite some time was Hosted by S.E. Cupp and involved large doses of Glenn Beck two people who are the Anti-Piers, he was probably on a short leash after that.