Andrew Sullivan takes the cosh to Piers Morgan:
One thing we have never heard on his week-long ratings-seeking descent into Jerry Springer land is any sane, reasonable, calm and credible figure who can marshal facts and arguments against gun control. Don’t get me wrong. I cannot fathom why assault weapons are somehow integral to either hunting or resistance to an Obama-led coup. But I do know that there are intelligent points to be made – about how gun control cannot truly work in a country with as many legal guns as the US, how the country’s history and constitution make it incomparable to a place like Britain, how mass confiscation is impractical and could make matters much worse, etc, etc.
We absolutely should have this debate – in as reasonable and calm a fashion possible, if only out of some shred of respect to the twenty murdered children in Newtown and their families. Instead we got a rolling freak-show designed entirely for ratings, since Morgan has never actually practised anything but gutter tabloid journalism and once sent an email to a policeman aggrieved by Morgan’s disgusting contempt for the privacy and dignity of anyone in public life: “fame and crime sends most of the usual rules out of the window.” Hence the phone hacking which forced the closure of the newspaper, The News Of The World, he once edited, and his being fired from the second tabloid he edited for publishing fake photographs of supposed prisoner abuse by British soldiers.
If you want to have an idea of the sheer level or hatred and contempt for the man in his native Britain, check out this interview with Ian Hislop, the inspired editor of the British muck-raking and satirical magazine, Private Eye. Because Hislop offended Morgan on a TV show, Morgan put the Mirror on a six-month crusade to try and find every conceivably embarrassing detail of Hislop’s private life, and had photographers camped outside his house:
