CNN's Piers Morgan faces questions over time as editor
LONDON — CNN star Piers Morgan may be known to Americans as an empathetic English interviewer, but it's his past at the heart of Britain's troubled tabloid newspaper world that is being trotted out before the cameras this week.
The often colorful and sometimes controversial story of Morgan's rise to the top will be revisited Tuesday, when the former editor appears by videolink at a judge-led inquiry into the ethics and practices of Britain's scandal-tarred press.
His appearance has been widely anticipated — not least because of the 46-year-old's irreverent flippancy.
“So heartwarming that everyone in U.K.'s missing me so much they want me to come home,” he joked earlier this year amid demands he return to give evidence to the inquiry, set up by Prime Minister David Cameron following the disclosure that the now-defunct News of the World tabloid had for years illegally eavesdropped on the voice-mail messages of public figures.
Actors Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and singer Charlotte Church are among those who have given evidence about press abuse, while executives and lawyers for Murdoch's News Corp. have defended the newspaper.
Morgan shot to national prominence when he was picked by Murdoch to run the News of the World at age 28. Under his tenure the tabloid exposed actor Hugh Grant's liaison with Hollywood prostitute Divine Brown and Princess Diana's late-night phone calls to married art dealer Oliver Hoare. It wasn't all down to good reporting: Morgan has acknowledged he kept his edge in part through bribes paid to informants on rival titles.
In 1995 Morgan left the News of the World for the Daily Mirror. His time there was marked by scoops and controversy, but his editorship ended in 2004 when he ran a faked photograph purporting to show a British soldier urinating on an Iraqi detainee.
Morgan won a second life as a TV personality, eventually signing on as a judge of “America's Got Talent” and taking Larry King's old spot at CNN. So far, he's prospered.
Skeletons have already begun peeking out of the closet.
Critics have been picking through old interviews and his autobiography “The Insider,” in which Morgan makes clear he knew of phone hacking as long ago as 2001.
Morgan maintains that he has never hacked a phone, ordered anyone to hack a phone, or knowingly run a story based on an illegally intercepted message.
But the denial is hard to square with a 2006 article in which he said he'd been played a phone message former Beatle Paul McCartney left for his now ex-wife Heather Mills in the wake of one of their fights.
How did Morgan come to hear the tape? He's refused to say, but Mills told the BBC in August that “there was absolutely no honest way” he could have obtained the recording.