Piers Morgan has been dragged into the phone hacking scandal, again, after political blogger Guido Fawkes posted audio from a 2009 interview he did with BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
When asked about the extreme lengths that journalists would go to in order to get breaking stories, Morgan wobbled from the hole atop his double chin: "Well, to be honest let's put that into perspective. A lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves. That's not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work." Before Morgan was a smug America's Got Talent judge or a smug CNN presenter, he was a smug editor of both The News of the World and The Daily Mirror. Rumours had been circulating for weeks about his involvement in the phone tapping scandal that has been hogging the headlines endlessly over the past few weeks. Morgan for his part has been extremely vocal on his twitter page, slating Hugh Grant (even though he's desperately trying to emulate his "affable Brit" style in America) and commenting throughout the intense questioning/pie-ing of Rupert Murdoch. He's not being a wallflower, but that's hardly his style.
After the release of the audio recording Morgan issued a statement:
"There is no contradiction between my comments on Kirsty Young's Desert Island Discs show and my unequivocal statements with regard to phone hacking.
"Millions of people heard these comments when I first made them in 2009 on one of the BBC's longest-running radio shows, and none deduced that I was admitting to, or condoning illegal reporting activity."
"Kirsty asked me a fairly lengthy question about how I felt dealing with people operating at the sharp end of investigative journalism. My answer was not specific to any of the numerous examples she gave, but a general observation about tabloid newspaper reporters and private investigators.
"As I have said before, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone."
You're still an a**hole, though.
Mike Sheridan
