WASHINGTON, D.C., April 12, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Cancellation can happen to anyone, even famous, left-leaning, mainstream journalists like Britain’s Piers Morgan.
Morgan, a career journalist and television pundit who dared to like Donald Trump, was finally shot down for doubting the tale of woe peddled by the duke and duchess of Sussex to Oprah Winfrey last month.
On the British television channel ITV’s “Good Morning Britain,” Morgan had called the TV special with Oprah Winfrey “a two-hour trash-a-thon of our Royal Family, of the monarchy, of everything the Queen has worked so hard for.”
Morgan was subsequently challenged for his dislike of the duchess, American actress Meghan Markle, and, after the host walked off the set in a huff — and after the U.K.’s Office of Communications got 41,000 complaints — was fired. But it turns out that the actress-turned-duchess had a hand in the journalist’s firing herself.
Morgan told the story to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson last week, and a seven-minute clip from the interview has gone viral, with over two million views.
According to Morgan, Meghan contacted his boss, ITV’s Dame Carolyn McCall, after the journalist had objected on air to some of the claims Markle had made to Winfrey.
“I also know that she had personally contacted, along with Ofcom (Office of Communications), which is a government regulatory body,” Morgan continued. “So I was under attack by Miss Markle both directly to my boss and to the government regulatory body, under attack to basically conform to her versions of events.”
“I have to believe her, and if I didn’t, I was a callous racist, and I should be condemned and ultimately … lose my job.”
Markle, who has a white father and a black mother, blamed her unhappiness in Britain, her son’s relatively minor place in the Royal Family, and her decreasing popularity in the press on British racism. She alleged that the Royal Family decided not to give her son Archie the title “Prince” because of his skin color.
In fact, the title is not automatically given to grandchildren of the British monarch, let alone the great-grandchildren. (The children of the Queen’s one daughter, Princess Anne, have no titles, and the children of the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Edward, have relatively minor titles.) Markle also alleged that a member of the Royal Family — whom neither she nor her husband would name — had conversations with her husband about how “dark” Archie’s skin might be when he was born.
Morgan objected to the first story on the grounds that it was “completely untrue” and the second on the grounds that it unfairly tarnished almost the entire Royal Family as potentially racist. Prince Harry and his wife had confirmed with Oprah that the speaker was neither the Queen nor her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, but would not name the offender, giving him or her no opportunity to refute the claim. Morgan made it clear that he did not want a “racist king” in the future, but was very critical of Markle’s story about her son’s title.
“You can’t muck around with facts,” Morgan said in his last appearance on Good Morning Britain. “It’s been demonstrated today in every paper that that ‘fact’ (of Archie being robbed of princedom because of his potential skin color) was untrue.”
Another story that turned out to have been only half-true was that the duke and duchess were married secretly by the Archbishop of Canterbury in their “backyard” the day before their multimillion-pound wedding. Ending the furor after this claim, Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby said the legal wedding had been the public event, and that he would have committed a “serious criminal offence” if he had signed the couple’s wedding certificate “knowing it was false.”
“A journalist’s job … is to express skepticism about the some of the more outlandish claims, like the secret wedding, like the story about Archie becoming the prince, even the small stuff, like she’d never had any interest in the Royals and there are pictures of her draped over the Buckingham Palace railings when she was a teenager,” Morgan told Carlson.
“I should be able to be a journalist and question the veracity of those statements,” he continued. “And frankly, in a democracy that values freedom of speech, I should be allowed to say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t believe you.’ But I wasn’t. I wasn’t allowed to do that. It was Meghan’s way, and Meghan’s narrative, and Meghan’s ‘truth.’”
Morgan recalled that Winfrey had referred to Meghan’s “truth,” saying, “This is your truth,” and wondered what it meant and how society had begun to talk this way. He stated that the same liberals who had attacked Trump for “creating his own truths” applaud Markle for telling “her truth” and say that whoever doesn’t believe it is a racist.
“I’m sorry, I’m not a racist,” he exclaimed. “I just don’t believe her.”
Carlson suggested that both Oprah and the now world-famous Markle are posing as victims so as to seize more power over the relatively powerless.
“No one points out that the underlying irony here is that (you) have two of the most powerful people in the world claiming to be victims,” Carlson said. “They’re oppressed (but) they have more power than you; they got you fired, but you’re oppressing them.”
“The strong pretending to be weak in order to crush the people below them.”
Morgan described the details of Markle’s privileged life — marrying into the British Royal Family, moving to a $11 million mansion with her husband, and the couple winning lucrative show business contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He pointed out the irony that their titles come from the same British monarchy they accuse of victimizing them, but they won’t give up these titles because they make them so much money.
But the phenomenon of being fired for refusing to accept the lies of public figures claiming to be victims is larger than a spat among Piers Morgan, the prince, and the showgirl. Morgan pointed out that many people are suffering because of the tendency of “cancel culture” to punish people who say the wrong thing. He still has his job as an editor-at-large for the U.K.’s Daily Mail newspaper, and he knows he’s one of the lucky ones.
“There are many people who don’t have our platform who are getting wiped out, wiped out, eradicated, life destroyed, careers ended over the most ridiculous things,” Morgan told Carlson. “And it’s got to stop.”
The British pundit believes this will happen only when the great mass of people who aren’t offended “by absolutely everything” stand up and call a halt to it.
“Free speech is about hearing an opinion you don’t agree with and being able to accept that somebody else doesn’t feel like you,” he said.
Caroline Farrow, a Catholic apologist who has appeared as a guest on “Good Morning Britain,” told LifeSiteNews that although she does not have much sympathy for Morgan as a character, he is indeed “yet another victim” of cancel culture.
“While Piers Morgan is a character it is difficult to have much sympathy towards, he is yet another victim of today’s relativistic culture, which results in the sinister silencing of those who dare to question the current zeitgeist,” Farrow said. “In her interview with Oprah, Meghan Markle came out with a number of statements, now been proven to be false which cast doubt on whether her account is reliable.”
“Morgan was entirely within his rights to point out the inconsistencies and perfectly entitled to state his belief that she was not telling the truth about the situation. By playing the race card, Markle was cynically seeking to leverage society’s current concerns about racism in her favour.”
Farrow said that racism should always be taken seriously, but so should the pursuit of truth. Although she has smarted under Morgan’s verbal lash, she finds it “concerning” that he lost his job the way he did.
“I have been at the receiving end of Morgan’s acerbic manner on more than one occasion, and while one may take issue with his presenting style or the manner in which he presents his concerns, it is still nonetheless very concerning that a world-famous and arguably well-respected and experienced broadcaster should lose his job, simply for stating his opinion and the facts as he sees them,” Farrow said.
“It is also very worrying that Meghan Markle seems to have had a hand in his forced resignation. The British media should not be dictated to by a minor American actress who had the good fortune to marry into the British Royal family.”