Is it always going to be second prize for Piers Morgan? For years he was editor of the tabloid that trailed behind Rupert Murdoch's organ. Now, having taken over Larry King's role as CNN's marquee interviewer, Morgan finds himself in second place once again to Murdoch's Fox News.
According to ratings firm Nielsen, Morgan's heavily advertised debut on Monday in the 9pm slot for CNN garnered a respectable 2.1 million viewers, a substantial increase on the average nightly figure of 657,000 that King was pulling in the last three months of 2010.
But even with the hype surrounding Morgan's first guest Oprah Winfrey, Piers Morgan Tonight couldn't crack Fox News's grip on the cable TV news ratings. Morgan had the misfortune of running into Fox News's Sean Hannity interviewing Sarah Palin in the same time slot. That match-up got 2.36 million viewers and continued to make headlines the next day.
Morgan's show did easily beat MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who was watched by 1.1 million people for her interview with the film-maker Michael Moore, a frequent guest. But as the New York Times's media correspondent Brian Stetler noted:
Of course, the true test for Mr Morgan will come not on night one or night two, but weeks and months from now.
Morgan's appearance had a tepid response from US critics – the Los Angeles Times calling it "a non-starter" – but none were harsher than the Washington Post's Hank Stuever, who damned Morgan's "very Windows XP-looking set" and concluded:
But after all that buildup, Morgan's first show turned out to be a fawning and completely unnecessary interview with a successful businesswoman named Oprah Winfrey. It was a droning, previously recorded hour (Morgan has said he prefers to do taped interviews) on a network in desperate need of a newsy, dynamic talk show. The goal was to replace Larry King Live with something better, right?
Morgan's technique, said Stuever, made Oprah's previous interview with the notoriously mild Barbara Walters "look like a performance of Frost/Nixon".
