Apart from a two months charity course in Paris, I never got any formal education on the English language. I learned it by reading and watching TV.
The eighties in North America was the decade of trash-TV and televangelism. I especially appreciated Jimmy Swaggart for being such an articulate speaker, and I mean it literally, not figuratively. He pronounced everything with such clarity that his words were impossible to miss.
I watched quite bit of garbage, but I drew the line at Jerrys Springer. I watched parts of his shows maybe 4-5 times, but I never managed to finish a single episode. I was both disgusted and offended by their vulgarity. By the time reality shows like Survivor came about, I was to busy working and living my life to have any time left to waste on vulgarity and fakery.
Then came the nineties with the promise of the internet that kept me too busy to afford the time to watch trash. I think we tend to forget what a glorious promise that was. A promise of free expression, freedom from commercialization and the empowerment of the little people through the platforms giving them access to the whole of humanities knowledge.
What a disappointment that turned out to be…..
The little people turned out to be ….., well, little. Social media is on course to destroy actual social life. Fakery is everywhere, now also getting turbo-charged with AI content.
Just consider these two expressions: ‘Content provider’ and ‘influencer’. The first is the excuse for the presentation of commercial interest, the second is the hook to catch the attention of the impressionable. Just compare these expressions to ‘creators’ and ‘opinion/thought leaders’
At the heydays of trash-TV, politics was not a part of the offering. It was about the petty problems of vulgar people (or the other way around). Politics was still a serious business. Debates still had rules and moderators. We had the same divisions, but there was still some honest hope for the possibility of dialogue.
Alas, politics is catching up with the general decline. I’m sorry, I must correct myself.
What we are witnessing is not a decline, but a divergence between the frivolous and the serious. Between to long-form and the click-baits. Between the analytical and the confrontational. It is not all bad, but this post is about the bad part.
Piers Morgan moved his show to Youtube-first in February 2025. Here are his statistics now:
As of July 2025, the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel holds a notable position in multiple rankings, especially within the news and late-night talk show categories:
📈 Overall YouTube Rankings
Global Subscriber Rank: Around 32,111th overall
Views Rank: Approximately 19,380th globally
Subscribers: Over 4.04 million
Total Views: More than 1.15 billion
Videos Published: About 1,875
🗞️ News & Influencer Rankings
#4 in Global News Influencer Chart – Behind Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Philip DeFranco
#8 in Most Watched News Publishers – Based on total views
#3 Fastest Growing News Channel – By percentage growth in subscribers
Top 10 in Average Views Per Video – Among news personalities, ahead of Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly
🎙️ Late Night Show Category
Ranked #11 among YouTube channels in the Late Night Shows category
(from a Grok answer)
The picture on the top is a screenshot from his June 2025 episode “That’s a DUDE!”
It was watching that episode that made me realize that Jerry Springer style trash-TV has arrived on the Internet. Political discourse has descended to the level of trash-TV. They are not debates, just obnoxious shouting matches.
It is not very conducive to civilized coexistence. It is not helpful, but partisanship is right next to sensationalism to catch people’s attention. We respond to it like we do to salt, sugar and drugs. Emotional partisanship is addictive. Critical thinking needs effort.
No matter what the question is, it can be polarized. The moment it is, it can be turned into a divisive issue in which the righteous must confront the forces of evil.
The democratization of knowledge and communication has opened the door to the manipulation of our basest instincts and biological reactions with our active participation.
The Piers Morgan video is a perfect example. An important subject made vulgar.
AI is creating mediocrity, social media makes us antisocial and depressed, liberal democracies make us weak and powerless. Our whole culture is getting more violent and confrontational as we are getting ever more desensitized to both.
It is all just a circus. Participating in it is just demeaning.
Can you see a way to turn any of it around?
How do you see Piers Morgan? Is he responsible for creating the problem, or just surfing the cultural wave?
Let me know in the comments.
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Morgan was a trash vulture back when he was running the News of the World. Nothing new except the demarcations between high- and low-brow have been levelled.
With the exposure of the Covid crisis as a psychological operation and an attack upon free-thinking and freedom loving people everywhere, there is now an unending torrent of genuinely shocking news to absorb (one example is Kash Patel finding burn bags full of "thousands" of pages of documents relating to the Trump-Russia hoax, in a secret room of the FBI. If one was writing a novel this kind of scene would be too unbelievable!
Is it possible that the trash TV/news/social media is deliberately created and proliferated to distract from genuine scandals and treasons being committed against the citizenry? ~ Ginger Breggin, co-author with Dr. Peter Breggin of COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey