Tuesday 9 March 2021

Sacking Piers Morgan


It was one rant too many. Having vented his Meghan obsession following that interview, professional arsehole Piers Morgan finally got his comeuppance. Criticised on air by Good Morning Britain's weatherman, Alex Beresford, the straw that broke the braying donkey's back was the entirely correct observation that Morgan's antipathy to the Sussexes was thanks to Meghan breaking off their acquaintance. He couldn't handle the detonation of a truth bomb of this size and, in the best tradition of egotistical manbabies, he stormed off the set. See for yourself.

And now he's gone. According to the write up from ITV, Morgan has merely "left his role as presenter." Were 41,000 complaints and an Ofcom investigation too much even for the GMB bosses? Or was his sulking, skulking escapade something of a fatal wounding, a big mouth who was shut up by a bit-part player in the GMB line up? Not a good place to come back from when your shtick is an obnoxious line in hard questionning. This wasn't a triumph of decency, as if the executives have ever cared about that, but putting a wounded animal out of his misery and avoiding his contaminating the GMB brand beyond recuperation.

Where now for Morgan? I'm sure not many people care, but he'll find something. A berth at the Mail or Express maybe, a new national platform to cry about his cancellation. A path well-trodden by other whingeing right wingers complaining about their marginalisation in the pages of mass circulation titles. Social media has speculated about a slot on GB News, the great white hope of the Tory culture wars. It depends if it has pockets deep enough, and the station is capacious enough for a simultaneous accommodation of his and Andrew Neil's egos.

Morgan's obsession with Meghan is a high profile example of a depressing commonplace. Here is a comprehensive trove of obsessive Morgan tweets about her. Simply put, here was a man who couldn't handle how the object of his preoccupation rejected him and moved on with her life. Compounding this psychic wounding was the dramatic upending of their positions in the celebrity firmament. According to this syndicated Mail piece, by his own account he was flattered by their initial contact and clearly cast himself as a gatekeeper (or sugardaddy) willing and able to leaver his superior standing in the celebrity firmament to help her career along. For what in return we can only speculate. And then she met Harry, leapfrogging him in the rankings and leaving Morgan nursing his bruised entitlement.

Where have we encountered this before? Oh yes, in the comings and goings of everyday life. All those uncounted occasions of men treating women like property, of assuming an entitlement to women's time and attention. And if women dare brush them off, ignore them, or leave them, then woe betide the consequences. How many women are stalked and harrassed by former partners? How many women attract unwanted and uninvited attention from so-called admirers, or just men wanting to impose themselves on their lives in some way? Millions. And that's in this country alone. Morgan simply used his position to try and impose himself on Meghan, firstly with creepy flattery and overfamiliarity, and latterly deployed his considerable national platform to subject her to unending abuse and character assassination. If the press wasn't simply a plaything of moneyed interests, then perhaps he'd be the one receiving condemnation for his shitty and entirely willful behaviour. He'd have to account for his actions. Not the woman who spurned his unasked for admiration and had the nerve to couple up with someone way above his exalted station.

But there is a positive here. While the reasons for Morgan's departure are somewhat murky, it is being perceived as a blow struck against the snarky, obsessive and, yes, racist coverage that is the British media's stock-in-trade. And it's part of a pattern pointing to a slow but certain marginalisation, an uneven glacially-paced cancellation of right wingers from television media for whom boorishness and Morgan-style ranting is their bread and butter. Who follows Jeremy Clarkson any more? What happened to David Starkey? Won't someone give Laurence Fox a break? Indeed, the formation of GB News is a direct response to this slippage and, with any luck, will be a ghetto for the freakish and backward, a place of no more consequence to politics than Parler is to the global social media landscape. For that reason, it is okay to chalk up today as a good day.

Image Credit

7 comments:

David Lindsay said...

I do not join in the usual slagging off of Piers Morgan, because he was one of very, very few official journalists to see through the Iraq War from the start.

More broadly, we all know who wins elections in this country, so the idea of President Skinner is for the birds. Britain already has the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that is why every elected Head of Government for the next 100 years is going to bear more than a passing resemblance to the hereditary Head of State. From the accession of William V, they are usually going to have gone to the same school, and at least initially at the same time. The electorally decisive working class votes for this, or we would not have it. The bitterness comes from the public sector middle class, and from those who believe that their own life stories vindicate the "meritocratic" hokum of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.

Bringing us to the Government's curiously time-lagged proposals for voter suppression. The people who are at least 50 per cent likely to vote Labour have photographic identification coming out of their ears, because they can afford it, and because they can afford to do the things that already require it. But those who are vastly more likely to vote Conservative, which is the reason why that party has an overall majority of 80, routinely do not have photo ID, cannot afford it, and cannot afford to do the things call for it. The Conservatives propose to suppress their own vote.

Ricardo Rosso said...

Keeping it brief: good riddance!

DFTM said...

“How many women are stalked and harrassed by former partners?”

Probably not that many unless the woke generation count the odd tweet or text as harassment, which they probably do!

Call me old fashioned but if you truly love someone and then split up with them, that should be a painful experience for all involved. It shouldn’t be a post-modern, well onto the next piece of meat thank you very much.

“How many women attract unwanted and uninvited attention from so-called admirers, or just men wanting to impose themselves on their lives in some way?”

Probably the same as men who attract unwanted attention, it’s called sexual attraction, is hard wired into our DNA since we crawled out of the slime and no amount of woke faux outage will change that.

For my sins, while channel hopping I came across an old episode of, wait for it, Play Your cards Right and Brucie asked the couple how they had met. They told the story of how the woman had turned down her now husbands advances for a whole year before she finally said yes (or submitted to translate to woke). This couple seemed very very happy and had children and grandkids. Today the woke liberals would have us believe this wonderful relationship was the product of female harassment and oppression!

“All those uncounted occasions of men treating women like property”

Being objectified is how humans deal with sex, you get this in Lacan, as Zizek has sometimes demonstrated when he brave enough to go against the woke police.

Woke want relationships and sex to be a casual affair, like ordering the next fashionable thing from Amazon. I am with the romantics, love hurts, is a form of violence, includes possessiveness at its core and if it doesn’t, it isn’t love.

TowerBridge said...

@DTFM

You seem to be having a bit of a tantrum here and misunderstanding the word "woke". From what I read woke means being alive to social injustice.

You then appear to have an issue with a generation who are alive to this injustice. I don't think you are right to call it a generational issue, as it's a women's issue. Consequently, it seems you have an issue with women being more empowered and are having a tantrum much like our subject, Piers Morgan. I watched the video, he was mildly challenged and he stomped off to his room.

I did not know what to think of what the author has written here, so I asked my wife. She said that the blogger was quite right, that what he is describing is what happens to women all over the country. I am sorry about that. I'd like my mother, sisters etc not to have to deal with men like Piers who feel as entitled to their attention as he does. If that makes me a "wokeist" who you dislike then so be it. And sexual attraction has little to do with it - this is about power.

David Parry said...

DTFM

Where to begin?

Conflating sexual objectification and persistent sexual advances with sexual attraction?

Legitimising ideas of ownership which underpin domestic abuse?

Endorsing a TV drama storyline that portrays a man's persistent, unwanted sexual advances towards a woman as 'romantic' and not the behaviour of an entitled creep?

Implying that women being stalked and harassed by ex partners is just a legitimate part of the price that people ought to pay for the breakup of romantic/sexual relationships?

I second Towerbridge. If objecting to this kind of horseshit makes me part of your hated woke generation, then so be it! I'd far rather be woke than a woman-hating, abuse legitimising scum cunt! Now go kindly crawl back into whatever manospherian swamp of misogyny and apologetics for the abuse of women from whence you came, you fucking troglodyte!

Boffy said...

Looks like DFTM/BCFG/CAAC and all the other aliases he uses is setting up for a return of his racist, sexist, homophobic BNP supporting persona of The Sentinel, or whatever his new version of it will be. Still he's already achieved his ambition of spouting inflammatory crap in order to provoke a response, and the tinder for the flame wars he lives on.

DFTM said...

I have no idea who this sentinel is and if Boffy can provide the ip’s please do as Mr carty demanded.

I have never spouted any racist abuse in my life and abhor racism in all forms.

My response to this had nothing really to do with Morgan, it was more general.

It depends on how you define harassment. If you consider harassment a few text messages then I don’t consider that harassment, if you consider harassment threatening behaviour and stalking then I would expect the police to get involved and deal with the issue. I would also expect this issue to be relatively small one, however upsetting for those involved.

But what do you expect me to do about the fact that some relationships end badly and emotions run high? Do you expect men to be under curfew? Or do we say that women cannot be trusted to make good decisions about who they choose to go out with and therefore we will bring in arranged marriages, so only suitable characters are chosen for them.

Seriously wokists, what do you want me to do with the information that you are presenting to me?

If you want women to be shielded from the realities of evolutionary impulses then something quite draconian must be on the cards, well tell us what Earth shattering proposals you wish to impose us on rather than all this faux outrage. At least them instead of responding to your moral outrage I can assess your concrete proposals, you never know I might even agree with them.