Vanity Fair Targets Piers Morgan With "Scandal List"

Piers Morgan: Scandalous?

Piers Morgan, who's CNN's choice to take over for the retiring Larry King, and who will be on On The Air With Ryan Seacrest Thursday, is considered the mistake choice by some, and now is the focus of a stinging Vanity Fair blog post outlining six scandals that Morgan was reported to have been involved in.

Some of the accounts VF listed are fair game, but others are a bit of a reach. Still, Morgan's led an interesting life.

Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner blogs that as editor of The Mirror's business column, bought shares of stock in an electronics firm, then suggested its readers do so as well. Morgan, who was the boss of the writers of the column, also did so, but claimed he didn't know about the content of the column.

Then Morgan got into an on air brawl with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, as both were guests on The BBC Show , Have I Got News For You. reportedly, the two don't like each other. Here's the video, where one YouTube commentator described Piers as a "twat of epic proportions:"



The Piers Morgan wrote a book that Weiner claims was a "scandalous" romp through his decade. It's called The Insider. But if Weiner checked, it was based on his column of the same name in The Daily Mail, and was more about celebrity encounters than anything Morgan allegedly did.

The rest of the Vanity Fair scadal list for Piers Morgan is little more than small accounts of conveluted assumptions of Morgan's alleged desire to get dirt on the guy he brawled with, Ian Hisop.

I'll save you the trip to Vanity Fair, as Juli blogs...

Moon-faced little midget: The Mirror, under Morgan’s stewardship, offered financial gains to anyone who would dish on “that moon-faced little midget,” an epithet for Hislop.

Tangerines, an obsession with: “The Hislop campaign has been going well, with all sorts of accusations ranging from a weird obsession with tangerines to a chronic piles problem that needed lasering ... I’m just doing it for fun. He is, after all, the editor of a piss-taking magazine and the presenter of a piss-taking TV show. Yet nobody dares take the piss out of him”—so read a 2002 entry in The Insider.

Tangerines, an apparently healthy relationship toward: The Telegraph reports that despite Morgan’s promises of rewards in exchange for information, he “couldn’t find any” scandalous rumors—fruit-related or otherwise—pertaining to Hislop.

Was all of that worth it? Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter must have it in for Piers, because all that stuff's a major reach at best.

Well, except for the brawl and the stocks.