Rupert Murdoch’s $42M British TV Bet On Why It Must Be More Than Just The Piers Morgan Channel
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: It’s a year to the day since Rupert Murdoch’s big British television bet TalkTV took flight, hitched firmly to the wings of Piers Morgan.
In the pre-launch marketing blitz, Morgan was pictured as half angel, half devil, but there was little doubt that News Corp’s UK arm thought he would be manna from heaven for television audiences. “Love him or hate him, you won’t want to miss him,” ran the poster line, dwarfing branding for TalkTV, the new network he was spearheading.
The message seemed clear: TalkTV was Piers TV. Morgan vision made real. It was a mistake. Or at least that’s the view of Richard Wallace, the man who was parachuted in to run TalkTV three months after its launch. “He said very clearly, in front of all staff, that building a TV station around the cult of an individual is not the way to go,” says an insider.
Just ask Tucker Carlson, who was ruthlessly ousted from Fox News on Monday in a firing that proved that no one presenter is bigger than a Murdoch network.
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