Last week, on Piers Morgan’s show, one guest called another a “terrorist piece of crap” as the journalist Glenn Greenwald and a retired U.S. general watched.
The week before, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother abruptly hung up on Mr. Morgan. A few weeks before that, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz threatened to sue the satirist Bassem Youssef during a broader debate about whether Mr. Epstein was a spy.
Every week on YouTube, Mr. Morgan moderates these melees about the news, joined by government officials, emerging pundits and conspiracy theorists. (Sometimes these roles overlap.)
It is chaos. It is also working. Mr. Morgan’s channel, Uncensored, has more than 4.3 million subscribers on YouTube, ranking him just below the manosphere mascot Theo Von but above Megyn Kelly, another expatriate of mainstream media.
Yet behind the scenes, there is more method than madness, as Mr. Morgan tries to build a new media empire.
In January 2025, he took control of his channel from its previous owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK. By the end of the year, Mr. Morgan had raised $30 million to add new shows in new categories with new hosts.
This week, he announced Rashida Jones as his first chief executive. A former president of MSNBC — since renamed MS NOW — Ms. Jones presided over more than 30 anchors from the heights of 30 Rock. Now she is working from her home in New Jersey for a YouTuber.
“You don’t get to build media worlds often,” Ms. Jones said of the opportunity.
Yet Mr. Morgan’s history with such traditional media bosses is checkered.
Although he became the youngest editor of a British newspaper in a half-century, taking over News of the World in 1994 at age 28, his tenure at another tabloid, The Daily Mirror, was more infamous: He was fired in 2004 after the paper published faked photographs of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi detainee.
And though his jovial arrogance eventually won over American audiences on “The Celebrity Apprentice” and “America’s Got Talent,” his CNN prime-time show was canceled in 2014 amid poor ratings.
He can be unpredictable. He sometimes calls his guests “clowns,” “hypocrites” or male appendages. While he identifies as a centrist, he seems more MAGA-friendly than not — chummy with President Trump and the Fox News crowd — except for his distaste for guns and, lately, Israel.
To Ms. Jones, who led a network known for its liberal slant, this is his strength. “It’s why people watch,” she said. “There’s an element of surprise in his perspective. The range of guests that he has on the show is broad and wide, and they’re not all aligned with his point of view.”
As YouTube overtakes traditional television, charismatic hosts like Mr. Morgan have reshaped the media landscape. Promising to “tell it like it is,” free from party politics and corporate interests, they embrace “being the news” as much as covering it.
“I’m the ringmaster,” Mr. Morgan said over lunch at the Carlyle, his luxury hotel of choice in New York City, where he both compared himself to Walter Cronkite and embraced those who liken him to Jerry Springer. “A man in the middle.”
Do his debates hold a mirror up to the train wreck of modern political discourse? Or do they just pour gas on an already raging fire?
“I genuinely think if you watch my show,” Mr. Morgan said, “you’ve got a better chance of getting to the truth than probably any other.”
Ownership and ‘Mini-Mes’
It sometimes seems Mr. Morgan can survive anything.
Along with his career scandals, he has weathered phone-hacking accusations (from Prince Harry, which he has denied) and various celebrity beefs (like a much-hyped feud with Madonna). He has broken ribs (in 2007, crashing a Segway in Santa Monica, Calif.) and fractured a hip (in January, tripping on steps at a hotel restaurant in London). These misfortunes have been chronicled by the same tabloids that formed him.
Mr. Morgan, who is 60, began his career at Mr. Murdoch’s news empire in the late 1980s as a showbiz columnist for The Sun.
Three decades later, in 2021, they reunited. Mr. Morgan had just left “Good Morning Britain” after an outcry over his comments doubting the mental health struggles of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. She joined nearly 58,000 viewers in complaining to British regulators about his insults, apparently breaking a government record and triggering an investigation. (He refused to apologize and was later cleared of wrongdoing.)
For a reported 50 million pounds, or about $70 million at the time, Mr. Morgan agreed to spend the next three years producing content across News Corp properties: tabloid columns, crime documentaries, a book for HarperCollins called “Woke Is Dead.” He would also help start TalkTV, a television channel aspiring to rival the BBC.
TalkTV faltered, but all was not lost: The channel’s “Piers Morgan Uncensored” — also streamed on Fox Nation — found success on YouTube. Millions watched the host’s explosive interviews with Andrew Tate, the chauvinistic influencer, and Fiona Harvey, the woman who claimed to inspire the stalker on Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer.”
To Mr. Morgan, the economics of YouTube’s automated advertising were attractive: The more plays, the higher the payout, in perpetuity. He estimated that an hourlong interview with Priscilla Presley in 2023, which has accumulated five million views, generated $150,000, covering the $20,000 fee paid for her exclusivity.
But until he owned his channel, those earnings were not his to keep.
At the end of 2024, he asked to visit Mr. Murdoch in New York. A contract renewal was on the table, “nearly as big as my last one,” Mr. Morgan said. Instead, he told Mr. Murdoch that he wanted to try working for himself. “I could take a really big talent deal, but actually, if I get this right, it will dwarf that,” he said of his thinking.
Over the next year, Mr. Morgan added 700,000 subscribers, as he found business partners, financiers and, eventually, a chief executive.
A few months ago, one of his new agents at WME, Bradley Singer, floated Ms. Jones’s name. Having left MSNBC around the same time Mr. Morgan left News UK, she was working as a consultant for one of Uncensored’s new investors.
In her role as chief executive, Ms. Jones’s project is to assemble a cast of equally strong personalities alongside Mr. Morgan. There is already “History Uncensored,” hosted by Bianca Nobilo, a former CNN anchor and hobbyist archaeologist. Next, Ms. Jones will oversee the creation of shows about sports, true crime, entertainment and beyond. (“I bet there’s a lot of women who would love to watch a really smart, fun ‘Beauty Uncensored,’ right?” Mr. Morgan asked me.) She’ll also explore revenue opportunities in subscriptions, licensing and events, she said.
Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart built media empires, but their brands remained dependent on them, said Joe Ravitch, whose private equity firm, the Raine Group, has become Uncensored’s lead investor, and who has joined the Uncensored board.
“Piers will become an increasingly smaller and smaller part, not because his voice diminishes but because we’ve been able to build up ‘Mini-Mes,’” Mr. Ravitch said. He is also adamant that Uncensored serve a politically independent audience, challenging the perception that Mr. Morgan is right-wing: “He’s not at all.”
The question of whether Mr. Morgan might cause another career-shifting controversy, like Meghan-gate, does not seem to worry these new partners. For the first time in his career, he cannot really be fired or forced out.
“Who’s going to cancel a guy who only needs an internet connection and a studio, which he owns?” Mr. Ravitch said. “Advertisers can pull out, but a lot of advertisers won’t pull out, and other advertisers will step in for the ones who pulled out.”
‘What’s Funny About It?’
As an interviewer, Mr. Morgan tends to provoke, even agitate.
“He’s always been very good at that,” his former producer at CNN, Jonathan Wald, said. “Asking the right questions and getting the right performance out of the people he’s with on camera.”
YouTube has further unleashed him. Clavicular, a 20-year-old social media star, recently warned Mr. Morgan’s team before an interview that if Mr. Morgan tried to ask him about politics, he would ask Mr. Morgan about his wife, who often writes candidly about their marriage. (Neither man backed down.)
“Piers and Clav are generations apart, but they share in common that they both know what makes for good TV on the internet,” said Mitchell Jackson, a publicist for Clavicular and other personalities who have appeared on Mr. Morgan’s show.
Adam Mockler, a 23-year-old progressive YouTuber, said he had spent about eight months trying to get booked on “Uncensored” before his first appearance. “It validated me,” he said. “I’m now, like, a man in the arena.”
Last fall, I watched from Mr. Morgan’s London studio as a panel was convened to discuss the arrest of a comedian and activist who was accused of inciting violence on social media. His posts referred to punching transgender women in the genitals.
Mr. Morgan, who has compared “wokeism” to fascism, took the position that the comedian had simply made “a rather crass joke.”
“What’s funny about it?” asked Laurie Penny, a feminist writer joining him in the studio.
Through Mr. Morgan’s earpiece, a producer guided the raucous hourlong debate toward what the producer called, in a Scottish accent, “our great ‘gotcha’ moment.”
But after Mx. Penny volunteered that they were transgender and nonbinary, Mr. Morgan pivoted, grilling them for several minutes. “You look, to me, female,” he said. “You’re a female? Are you a female? Are you a female?”
“This has really become uncomfortably personal,” Mx. Penny replied, unwilling “to discuss the contents of my underpants.”
That evening in his dressing room, after a producer escorted Mx. Penny from the studio, Mr. Morgan reflected on this type of segment as “entertaining” but unproductive. “People get themselves into a bit of a tortured mess over the language,” he said.
That includes him. Mr. Morgan, “a stickler for grammar,” had feigned ignorance over the definition of “nonbinary” and Mx. Penny’s plural pronouns. “I really wanted her to articulate it,” he continued, declining again to use those pronouns (Mx. Penny did not respond to inquiries about the appearance.)
“I don’t want to vilify trans people,” Mr. Morgan offered. But, he said, he does want to defend the rights of people like the “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling to express their opinions about trans people. “And I don’t even like J.K. Rowling,” he said. “She doesn’t like me. She’s called me all sorts of things.”
Throughout our interviews, Mr. Morgan could sound vaguely Trumpian. Early on, he plugged his nickname for the Duchess of Sussex: “Princess Pinocchio.” He told stories about bumping into the hockey legend Wayne Gretzky at the Polo Bar; about emailing with the British pop star Robbie Williams about Egyptian pyramids; about hanging a portrait of a rhinoceros made by Queen Camilla in his “loo.” He listed, among his “great friends,” Joan Collins, Barbara Walters and Sharon Osbourne. He complained about people in society who took “fat jabs” and became “crushing bores.”
Mr. Morgan has admired Mr. Trump since taping “The Celebrity Apprentice” in 2007, before which, he said, he read “The Art of the Deal” thrice. On their first day of production, he recalled, Mr. Trump approvingly referred to him as “Rupert’s boy.”
Though they have occasionally quarreled, Mr. Morgan attended Qatar’s state dinner for Mr. Trump last year — and his inflammatory rally at Madison Square Garden before the election — and confirmed he would have voted for him in 2024 if he were a U.S. citizen.
Mr. Morgan believes that Mr. Trump’s policy contains a “core of common sense,” he said. “It’s his mouth that causes a lot of the problems.”
One of his most popular guests on “Uncensored” is the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens; their sparring sessions over her conspiracy theories have easily exceeded 10 million views. Speaking to The New York Times by phone, Ms. Owens called Mr. Morgan “obnoxious” and “a pain” who did “sleazy things” in his tabloid heyday.
“But he knows he’s a pain,” she said, “and so it makes him quite likable.”
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
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