Piers Morgan Thinks the American Media Should Shine Donald Trump's Turds

Mainstream media figures like Morgan, Bill Maher, and Stephen A. Smith have turned false balance into a very lucrative business model.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

I keep a filing cabinet in my head reserved for a very specific political affliction, and every month another poor soul wanders in and starts decorating the place. Back in May, I diagnosed Stephen A. Smith with patient zero status for Asymmetric Neutrality Syndrome — the strange condition that causes people to loudly market themselves as fearless centrists or independent thinkers while somehow discovering that Democrats are always the real problem and Republicans are forever one good interview away from redemption.

I wrote an entire piece arguing Stephen A. didn’t just catch the disease; he discovered it, cultured it in a petri dish, and accidentally became its first superspreader. Then last month I wrote about Bill Maher, the syndrome’s reigning monarch, a man capable of staring directly at authoritarianism and somehow deciding the bigger emergency is whatever nineteen-year-old liberal annoyed him that afternoon. Piers Morgan is neither the patient zero nor the king. Piers Morgan industrialized it. He took Asymmetric Neutrality Syndrome, slapped an international distribution label on the box, and started shipping it overseas.

The occasion for finally giving him his own courtroom, after years of mentioning him only in passing, was a Bulwark Podcast episode from July 7th, in which Tim Miller — who has been a guest on Morgan’s show more times than he’d probably like to count — finally got the chance to sit across from him and ask the questions instead of answering them. I had to stop what I was doing to watch it. Not because anything Miller said was especially novel. Because he said, in about four seconds, the thing I had been circling for years without ever landing the plane.

A little biography helps here, because Piers Morgan’s entire public personality is downstream of the same psychological paper cut reopening every few years. CNN cancelled his show in 2014 after the ratings cratered during his post-Sandy Hook campaign against American gun laws — a position that was perfectly defensible on the merits, delivered with the subtlety of a man trying to swat a mosquito with a medieval siege weapon. Somehow that snowballed into an actual White House petition demanding his deportation, which the Obama administration was legally obligated to answer by politely reminding everyone that the First Amendment applies even to loud British people. Morgan now tells that story like he barely escaped political persecution. In reality, he got cancelled by Nielsen households. It wasn’t a constitutional crisis. It was capitalism doing what capitalism does when people stop watching.

Seven years later he did it again. This time he stormed off the Good Morning Britain set rather than sit through criticism of his Meghan Markle coverage, then resigned days later instead of admitting he might have gotten it wrong. Different network. Different controversy. Same emotional architecture. Lose the argument, declare yourself the victim, wrap yourself in principle, and head for the nearest exit before anyone gets to the rebuttal.

Two spectacular exits, seven years apart, both following the exact same script. That’s not a résumé. That’s a recurring diagnosis with excellent production values.