After Being Fired for Low Ratings, Piers Morgan Says CNN Shouldn't Worry About Ratings

It was worth a shot.

Piers Morgan swears he doesn’t miss CNN, but the network is still very much on his mind.

“I’ve never looked back, because I never feel negative,” Morgan said in his first interview since leaving the network in September. “The problem is when you go into a deep decline and start believing what other people are saying about you, like, ‘I’m a terrible dimwit British failure who’s been sent home packing in the goat class, and we’re never going to see him again.’”

Morgan certainly has a lot of ideas about what the network should and should not do for a guy who isn’t looking back:

Still, Morgan faults Zucker and CNN for being overly preoccupied with ratings.

“I’ve always felt that CNN should be more resilient to media criticism about monthly or quarterly ratings,” Morgan says. “Ted Turner once described CNN to me as The New York Times of television. We don’t care about chasing ratings or chasing readers. We care about having a brand that is so trusted that whenever anything important happens in the world, people turn us on.”

“If I was running CNN, if I was Jeff Zucker, I would come out and do an interview with someone like you, and I would say, ‘I’m not going to discuss ratings again,’” Morgan continues. “Our business proposition is not predicated on ratings, our global brand is not dependent on how we rate at 9 p.m. in America.”

So, don’t just shift the goal posts, dig them up, throw them away and then every field goal is good, right?

This is obviously a dig at Fox News, which has already proven that ratings can be had in the cable news game. Morgan’s assertion that CNN can be a “trusted” brand implies that FNC is not. The ever-simplistic Morgan doesn’t understand that ratings and trust are a tandem in the television news business.

But then he doesn’t understand a lot of things.