Is CNN's Piers Morgan the next to fall in the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal?
CNN, which has given the scandal plenty of play, is starting to face questions about its treatment of allegations implicating its own Larry King replacement.
Seems Morgan was once an editor of the News of the World, the British tabloid that started all of this — though his alleged improprieties were during his tenure as editor of a different tabloid: the Daily Mirror.
On Monday, Guido Fawkes, a British politics blog, claimed Morgan condoned hacking during his editorship. Fawkes alleges that an award-winning article from 2002 was the result of a Mirror reporter hacking Swedish TV personality Ulrika Jonsson's phone — with Morgan's approval.
The blog didn't supply much evidence, but one of Fawkes' sources is Morgan's own book, "The Insider," in which Morgan talks about a "little trick" that sounds a whole lot like hacking.
While different news outlets have begun to pick the story up, CNN has remained silent. Adweek pointed this out to CNN, which defended its silence by saying that Morgan has not been summoned to testify.
But while he has not been formally summoned like the Murdochs, MPs have said Morgan should face questioning.
Morgan himself addressed the speculation on Monday, telling the CBS daytime show "The Talk" that he had not broken any laws.
However, neither CNN nor Morgan have responded to the allegations since then. A CNN spokesperson said the network has no comment while the Mirror has denied any wrongdoing.
So what happens if CNN and Fox News, bitter rivals in the cable news arena, end up being united by the same scandal? If history is any indication, they will take snipes at one another.
For now, they are both in defense mode, with Fox taking heat for not devoting enough airtime to the scandal that has enveloped its parent company, News Corp.
