CPRC on Piers Morgan’s cancelation at CNN

CPRC’s president, John Lott, has been on Piers Morgan’s CNN show many times. With Morgan’s announcement yesterday that his show was being cancelled, John Lott wrote a piece for the National Review Online. The piece starts this way:

Sunday’s announcement that Piers Morgan had lost his show at CNN was hardly unexpected.

The ratings for the coveted 9 p.m. time slot were abysmal, dropping last week to just 270,000 viewers — about one-eighth of what Fox News’s Megyn Kelly got in the same time slot.

Some, such as Variety magazine, have speculated that the low ratings are due to Morgan’s single-minded push for gun control. That might have something to do with it, but much more is going on.

In all the thousands of television and radio interviews that I have done over the years, my appearances on Morgan’s show have generated more immediate e-mails than any other show that I have ever been on.

The response made one thing immediately obvious: Only the most diehard gun-control advocates watched his show. But even some of them were unwilling to listen to his abuse. . . .

You can continue reading the piece here.

Powerline blog references the National Review piece here.
Erik Wemple over at the Washington Post has his own useful discussion of what happened to Piers Morgan’s show and the discussion is fairly similar to what Lott wrote. In another piece, Wemple noted: “The National Rifle Association doesn’t need hold a press conference to explain itself. Gun companies needn’t deploy lobbyists. All they need to do is show up on Morgan’s show, where he’ll surely transform them into sympathetic figures.“

UPDATE: Quite amusingly, Piers’ Representative respond to Eddie Scarry about Lott’s op-ed at National Review this way:

“For the record… That’s ridiculous. Just ridiculous,” Morgan’s rep told us in an email when asked to comment on Lott’s piece. As for the part about Morgan remarking on Lott’s eyebrows: “No comment,” said his rep. . . .

Scarry noted that this response was not very clear. Here is his description of the email exchange that he had with Scarry’s:

I asked for her to comment on the piece, including the “eyebrows” part. She responded “for the record… that’s ridiculous.”

I sent a follow up email to her asking if she can be more clear or elaborate. She sent an email nearly unintelligible about it being “off the record” (despite having said “for the record”) and then she said she had “no comment” on the eyebrows bit. . . .