Megyn Kelly and Piers Morgan both took turns taking shots at CNN for trying to make its shows look like podcasts.
On Monday’s episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show,” the host and her guest questioned the decision to shoot Jake Tapper’s show, “The Lead,” from his office. While Morgan thought it was flattering, given its clear attempt to emulate video podcasts, Kelly wondered if it wasn’t a huge waste of CNN’s money and a “desperate ploy to save their ratings.”
“I think flattery is the most impressive thing you can have. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,” Morgan said. “I watch your show very regularly, and often you’re in different locations. It doesn’t matter where you are, because you can create exactly the same show from wherever you are in the world, and I’m the same. I’ve been all over the world doing my show from all sorts of different locations. That’s the beauty of the nimbleness of what we now do. We know that our viewers thoroughly embrace that.”
He added: “But the difference is we’re not mainstream media, and they’ve been very sniffy about all of this and saying, ‘Oh, look at these podcasters. No one really cares about…’ There’s this whole campaign going on now that [they’re] all irrelevant, these podcasters and YouTubers, no one cares. And I’m like, I’ve got four kids from 32 down to 14. None of them watch mainstream television at all. They all watch YouTube. They all watch my show, your show, they watch Tucker [Carlson], they watch Candace [Owens].”
Later in her show, Kelly slammed CNN once again for trying to go the podcast route by pivoting the look of its shows. The host was curious if the now casual set was a waste of all the great design tools the news organization has at its disposal.
“Not only are they cosplaying as podcasters, but … he’s got all the CNN fancy tools — they have a whole graphics department. Does he use that to show a map when he’s talking about the Iranian gas fields? No,” Kelly bemoaned. “But they’ve got a setup camera which pans to a physical map above his desk. So now we have to do the bird’s eye look down at his desk, instead of using the enormous graphic design tools that CNN has spent millions of dollars to build … Talk about flushing your money down the drain.”
For the last week, CNN has been changing up the format for a few of their shows. Specifically, for “The Lead,” Tapper filmed in a new set with a more casual feel, adding the aforementioned physical map for him to pour over from time to time. Outside of “The Lead,” Anderson Cooper was pulled out from behind the desk and placed in the newsroom with rolled up sleeves and a big microphone in front of him, also giving a podcast feel.
