Piers Morgan Wants to Conquer America’s Midterm Election Coverage

Piers Morgan is placing a big bet: On election night, as Americans decide where to tune in to get their political news fix, the newspaper editor-turned TV personality thinks that his Uncensored YouTube channel will be a platform of choice.

Morgan tells The Hollywood Reporter that he and his team at Uncensored are planning a live four-hour election night extravaganza, from 7-11, give or take, from a custom set with the U.S. Capitol Building behind them. Morgan notes that his show is never live (even if it does tackle current events), making election night a significant test for the channel.

“Being in Washington for the midterms is really important because I think we want to be at the epicenter of what is going to be — I think — one of the most consequential midterm elections in modern American history,” Morgan says, noting that the U.S. is Uncensored’s biggest global market. “I think what it’s done is that unlike most people in our space who have a partisan perspective on things, either to the left or to the right — and they’re very successful at doing it, I’m not criticizing at all — but I think what we’ve built is a very successful model where we’re not partisan, I’m not deemed to be partisan, people can’t box me into left or right, to Democrat or Republican, or in the U.K. to Labor, Conservative, whatever.”

So, what does Morgan have up his sleeve for election night? he is remaining coy about certain things, though he is promising interviews with newsmakers, and appearances from people who would be familiar faces to Uncensored viewers providing real-time analysis, commentary and predictions.

“We’re not going to compete with the NBCs and the CNNs on having every single result in real time. That’s not what I I think my role on the night will be, it’s not what my viewers expect,” Morgan says. “I think what they expect is just rolling analysis as the results come in: What does this all mean? How significant is the evening going to be? What are going to be the big successes and failures for the respective competing parties in this election?

“I want to know what people from both sides are thinking in real time. Is it going to be a great night for the Democrats? The blue wave everyone’s been talking about? Will it be that the great survivor Trump survives again? You know, can he keep the Senate? Could he potentially keep the House? Looks unlikely he’ll keep the House, but he might,” Morgan adds. “The thing about Trump, I do know, is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen with any great certainty, and that’s what’s interesting about this midterm … You can look at all the polls and say it looks like it’s going to be a very bad night for him, but I think being in Washington to see how it plays out is going to be absolutely riveting.”

“We’re not going to have 10 people at watch parties across the country. We’re not going to have a person at the board giving us numbers in real time,” says Rashida Jones, the CEO of Morgan’s Uncensored, noting the wide availability of real-time data and results. “Everyone’s using the same data, it’s their slight interpretation of what the data means. What we bring to the table is interesting voices, real-time conversation, and the flexibility of digital first.”

There’s reason to believe it will work. After the 2024 election YouTube shared data that suggested that more than 45 million people watched election coverage on its platform. While the most-watched live streams were dominated by those from Fox, NBC and ABC, the podcaster Patrick Bet-David also cracked the top five, suggesting that there is a real market for talk and debate too.

Indeed, Morgan has become one of the most successful digital creators in the news space. Not too bad for someone who used to make 9 p.m. on CNN his TV home. He now seems to hold considerably more sway via Uncensored, as his recent newsmaking interview with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy underscored.

The interview, which ran over an hour long, garnered more than a million views on the Uncensored YouTube channel, and hundreds of millions more impressions across TikTok, Instagram, X and other platforms where clips appeared.

“It’s pretty extraordinary moment for me that the president of Ukraine, at the center of the biggest news story in the world, decides to come into a YouTuber’s studio to sit with him and give him the only on-camera interview he gave in London that week, and to make news around the world,” says Morgan. “But they were very happy because it did make a lot of news. The next day, the front page of the Times and the Guardian in England led with ‘I’ve been betrayed, says Zelensky to Piers Morgan on his YouTube channel.’ That was great for us, but Zelensky’s people were very happy too because they got tremendous bang for their interview buck.”

As Morgan sees it, the future of news and commentary will be on these digital platforms, which increasingly set the agenda for what is being talked about on legacy platforms.

“There’s a ticking clock for mainstream media, for what people call legacy media,” Morgan says, noting how it was the media habits of his own kids that inspired him to leave traditional media behind for YouTube. “The average age of cable news viewers in America now is 70. That’s just a reality check… I ran two of the biggest print newspapers in Britain for many years, but the reality is that young people don’t buy print newspapers. They they get all their stuff off their phones. They may gravitate to digital versions of newspapers, and that’s certainly happening. But it’s a very different business model for these companies, and I think it’s reflective of the fact that young people they just they are the digital generation completely.”

Uncensored raised $27 million earlier this summer in a round led by the Greece’s Antenna Group and Raine Ventures, and Morgan says that the company was valued at $145 million in the investment. It subsequently hired Jones, the former president of MSNBC, to expand it into new verticals (it has since launched History Uncensored, Football Uncensored, and Royals Uncensored, with other genres to follow). It also launched a subscription earlier this month, offering ad-free access and bonus content.

“We’re banking on really appealing towards people who are frequent flyers, loyalists, deeply interested in all of our various topics,” says Jones, adding that live experiences will be a growth area for them. “People who are members of our premium tier will also get early access to live events, discounted tickets, and so similar to to how we’ve been able to build this free audience, we believe there’s an argument to provide even more premium content to a subset of that audience at what we think is a pretty competitive price.”

And Morgan and Jones say that Uncensored is also beginning to think about ways to take over linear TV, beginning with a deal with Channel 5 in the U.K.

“For us, it’s all additive because this is content that already airs on our channels,” Jones says. “For them, they’re getting premium content with a known audience at a much lower rate than they would pay for original hours of programming every week.”

MS NOW already runs content from Crooked Media, it isn’t a stretch to imagine Uncensored inking similar deals.

“Could you see a situation where Piers Morgan Uncensored potentially at some stage goes into the CNN primetime lineup? Well, why not?” Morgan quips. “I mean, I’m getting bigger numbers than any of they are.

“I mean, if I’m getting twice the numbers of Anderson Cooper, why would you continue paying him gazillions of dollars a year to air something which gets half the audience?”