Piers Morgan, and Why Nothing Ever Gets Better

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's now-famous interview with Oprah

Watching Piers Morgan walking offset on Tuesday, walking out the Good Morning Britain door, and apparently keeping on walking, was deeply satisfying. British TV audiences, or Anglophile foreigners like me, have watched him use his national platform to spout bilge for decades. Co-host Alex Beresford named and shamed Morgan’s history of attacking Meghan Markle, which apparently irked Morgan so thoroughly, he quit the most secure media job in Britain.

Morgan, a master of coded language, has frequently used his highly-rated breakfast news program to pooh-pooh Meghan Markle in ways that aren’t necessarily racist, in isolation. Honestly, watching him from across the Big Pond, I suspect Morgan doesn’t think of himself as racist, despite dedicating thirty minutes on Monday to airing his personal grievances. He’s just mastered navigating Britain’s top-tier media landscape, and doesn’t want anyone changing the map.

We’ve recently witnessed cheap spectacles like Morgan’s walkout frequently. The backlash against America’s Black Lives Matter movement pushed carpetbagger Marjorie Taylor Greene and high-school dropout Lauren Boebert into Congress this year. It took sixty complainants to make law enforcement take the Bill Cosby accusations seriously. And any woman who’s ever tried filing a stalking or sexual assault complaint knows she’ll find herself in the hot seat long before the man.

Why don’t we believe people? We seemingly believe that, if we take women’s and minorities’ accusations seriously, they would lie flagrantly. They’d supposedly falsify information and demonize White, cisgendered men for no reason but cheap thrills and short-term gain. The fact that this keeps not happening doesn’t dissuade anyone. Powerful people keep believing that humans are innate liars and undeserving of trust, especially the chronically powerless.

This manifests primarily in how society regards the “lesser,” the outsider. That is, we generally believe White people over Black people, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and men over women. Given the choice, we’ll bury the outsider group’s narrative until someone of sufficient power comes along and speaks up. Only when someone exceptional says something, the actress who married royalty perhaps, do we give these claims any credence.

Power defends power. Surely nobody reading this will disagree. Piers Morgan has defended execrable human beings like Donald Trump, and the sweat-free moral Shop-Vac that is Prince Andrew, because the existing system treats him pretty well. Maybe he isn’t bigoted; he just doesn’t want to fix the broken system, because its brokenness redounds to his benefit. If things got better, he might need to pound sand with us plebeians.

Piers Morgan quits

That isn’t a great excuse, but still…

People who work hard, follow the rules, and reap the rewards, have a disincentive to fix broken systems. Because doing so acknowledges they’ve benefited at others’ expense. To participate in more than token reforms means admitting they’ve profited from structural injustice, which might, arguably, make them bad people. Nobody likes to admit they’ve done wrong; we react to such challenges similarly to being punched in the nose.

Because I did okay, didn’t I? I followed the rules and won. So anyone else could, hypothetically, do the same. If I’m a good person, and the system did well by me, then good people should profit from the system. But if the system is wrong, it follows that I’m maybe not a good person. That’s a conclusion I can’t stomach, so I have to defend the system.

Religion and philosophy warn us this isn’t necessarily so. The knee-jerk emotional response, modeled in generations of fairy tales and Hollywood blockbusters, tells us character equals merit, which equals ultimate success. But we know that isn’t so. Good people of exemplary character can do everything right and still lose. This doesn’t make anyone “bad people.” But it also means we have to extricate ourselves from the system, even if we’ve profited from it.

That’s why Piers Morgan needed to throw a tantrum, because he knows the system reflects on him. He knows he must either separate himself, or get the lingering stench of rot all over himself. He remains tainted while he stays put, because the system which rewards him is entirely broken. That isn’t his fault, it’s just a manifestation of living in a broken world. It becomes his fault, though, when he remains there, knowing it’s corrupted.

Harry and Meghan exposed a corrupted system; Alex Beresford called Piers Morgan out for participating. Morgan defended himself by leaving, not just the situation, but ITV altogether. Given the opportunity to repent and improve the system, he chose to quit. That happens to everyone who profits from systemic corruption, eventually. As abolitionist William Wilbeforce said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”