Megyn Kelly, host of “The Megyn Kelly Show,” is joined by Piers Morgan, host of “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” to talk about CNN’s cringe attempt to look like podcasts with Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper’s shows, Ben Shapiro’s war on free speech, and more.

PIERS MORGAN: I think flattery is the most impressive thing you can have. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. I’m having just done seven weeks of filming my show from my sitting room at home because I managed to fall over and break my femur, I needed a new hip. You and I know… I watch your show very regularly, and often you’re in different locations. It doesn’t matter where you are, because you can create exactly the same show from wherever you are in the world, and I’m the same. I’ve been all over the world doing my show from all sorts of different locations. That’s the beauty of the nimbleness of what we now do. We know that our viewers thoroughly embrace that. But the difference is we’re not mainstream media, and they’ve been very sniffy about all of this and saying, Oh, look at these podcasters. No one really cares about… There’s this whole campaign going on now about no one that all irrelevant, these podcasters and YouTubers, no one cares. And I’m like, I’ve got four kids from 32 down to 14. None of them watch mainstream television at all. They all watch YouTube. They all watch my show, your show, they watch Tucker, they watch Candace. They watch all these shows. Increasingly, interestingly, they’re not watching Ben Shapiro, for example, I saw the numbers came out a few days ago about the dramatic shift downwards in his YouTube numbers. I’m not surprised, because he’s gone from Ben Shapiro, The King of Free Speech, to Ben Shapiro, the guy that says, If you say anything critical about Israel, you must be anti semitic and we must cancel you. The hypocrisy is real. But when I see someone like Anderson Cooper – to say working with him, and I lose that phrase advisedly, because he was such a poisonous little backstabber when I worked there, watching him rolling his sleeves up with his big old microphone, trying to be Edward Morrow was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I mean, at least with Jake Tapper, I found Jake Tapper’s office mesmerizing. He’s got so much cool stuff in there, but really, Anderson Cooper, the new Ed Murrow? Do me a favor… They are trying to look like us, but they don’t. Anderson Cooper never expresses an opinion worth listening to anyway, but that’s why people turn to us. They know what’s happening in the news. They want to know what to think about, what’s happening in the news, and we tell them, we give them strident, honest opinion, take it or leave it. But at least no one is controlling us. We’re our own bosses. We say what we believe in the moment. We’re not afraid to change our view. The facts change. We are unencumbered spirits. They cannot say the same. They’re still living the old mainstream media television rules, and they are like a straight jacket, as you and I discovered. MEGYN KELLY: On the subject of Ben Shapiro, who I know attacked you for absolutely no reason and just doubled down, he’s lost 150,000 subscribers over the past year. 150,000 at least, there’s a real reason to believe that he may be paying for subscribers and views. Many who study the industry believe that. But I want to show you one thing quickly. He’s not only trying to force you into saying what he wants you to say around Israel and this war, etcetera, and me too, he tried it with Michael Knowles, his own colleague… like a BLM’er, or he tried to make him say what he wanted him to say. Here’s the example… Say it. [Like] BLM, Say it. That’s what Ben Shapiro has become. PIERS MORGAN: He’s all for free speech, just as long as it’s exactly how he tells you [how] you need to speak. And I’m not having it, you’re not having it. That’s why our numbers are going through the roof as more and more people tune in. It’s why he’s losing his audience. And credit to Michael Knowles, who came on my show last week and was great, as he always is. We don’t always agree about everything, but he’s always a civilized debater. He’s always an interesting guy. He’s always well informed. He’s very intelligent, and he just wasn’t going to be browbeaten by Ben Shapiro into saying Ben Shapiro wanted him to say. MEGYN KELLY: Piers, Morgan, the one and only one of my inspos, for getting into the space to begin with. He wasn’t yet in this space when I got in this space, but his no nonsense, honest approach to the news has defined him for decades, and it was something I admired about Piers’ book back when I was still sort of the more polished anchor, not sharing her own opinions, including the day I got into podcasting back in 2020. I named him, Anne Tucker as two of my inspirations, because they were people who I felt spoke honestly to their audiences. The consequences be damned, now they will both wind up fired within like, two years of that, and that’s no accident… So eventually it comes for all of us, if we’re going to be super honest about the way we feel, because then we get dubbed controversial, and we get dubbed all the terrible things, and we have to live with that, unfortunately. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it for living free. My God, it’s worth it for living free. I live free. No one controls me. There’s no agenda pushing me to see one thing or another, anything other than my own opinion. I don’t take any foreign money. I don’t take any money from the government. I don’t owe any favors to anybody in the Trump administration. Nothing. That’s why I can give you my unvarnished view. You can take it. You can leave it. I think I have a close enough relationship with my audience that we can get through a disagreement because we have before, but you will not find that when you tune in to CNN or Fox. Now we know that Lindsey Graham and Rupert Murdoch, the two people, the guy who owns it and the guy who’s the face of it now, were the two biggest boosters pushing this war. Do you really think you’re gonna get objective analysis now over there on how it’s going? Do you? Of course not. I have no agenda. I’ll tell you what my bias is. We have to get through it together. We have to get through it together. And you have to get various viewpoints. And I know you can get the opposite, any place you want, any up and down the channel.

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