TV host Piers Morgan said this week that he was backstabbed by CNN host Anderson Cooper during his tenure at CNN, adding that the network is “a lot less friendly” than Fox News.
“I gotta say, and this, you know, people can believe this or not, but I find it a very friendly collegiate place to work,” Morgan said of Fox News during Monday’s episode of “On Air with Kara Swisher.” “Everyone’s very nice.”
“When I was at CNN, it could be a lot less friendly than Fox,” he continued. “A lot more back biting, a lot more backstabbing, actually, in some cases — don’t wanna mention names, but Anderson Cooper knows where he is. And I found that Fox — I found that Fox is a different atmosphere by contrast.”
Morgan didn’t elaborate on the ordeal but went on to comment on CNN’s “fascinating” changes.
“The way — if you look at how networks have changed, what happened at CNN in the last few years was fascinating,” he said. “You know, they went from being a completely nonpartisan, impartial, non-political network to an outright open Trump bashing entity.”
CNN’s anti-Trump refrains did not seem to pay off for the network, which has been through numerous shakeups in the last year.
Most notably, the network’s streaming platform CNN+ lasted only about a month before it was dissolved in April of this year.
A CNBC report said the service was garnering fewer than 10,000 viewers on a daily basis and was only able to capture around 150,000 subscribers — a far cry from the two million subscribers CNN hoped to snag.
CNN CEO Chris Licht has also let go of high-profile journalists, columnists, and contributors such as Brian Stelter, John Harwood, Jeffrey Toobin, and Chris Cillizza, The Daily Wire reported.
The network’s boss shuffled CNN’s lineup, too. He moved host Don Lemon out of a prime-time slot and into a morning show with two other co-hosts. Licht attempted to move host Jake Tapper into former host Chris Cuomo’s prime-time slot, but Tapper’s tenure there proved to be short-lived. Cuomo had been let go by the network months earlier after an internal investigation reportedly concluded that the host had inappropriately attempted to help his brother, Andrew Cuomo, as the former New York governor was mired in scandal.
Stephen Gutowski, Second Amendment expert and founder of firearms reporting site The Reload, has been brought on as a contributor under Licht’s tenure.
Tim Pearce contributed to this report