Piers Morgan

Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan (born Piers Stefan O'Meara, 30 March 1965), known professionally as Piers Morgan, is a British journalist and television personality currently working as the US editor-at-large for the Daily Mail website Mail Online and as a presenter on British breakfast show Good Morning Britain. He is also the editorial director of First News, a British national newspaper for children. Morgan began his journalism career in Fleet Street as a writer and editor for several tabloid papers, including The Sun, News of the World and the Daily Mirror. In 1994, aged 29, he was appointed editor of the News of the World by Rupert Murdoch, which made him the youngest editor of a British national newspaper in more than half a century. He later edited the Daily Mirror, and was in charge during the period that the paper was implicated in the phone hacking scandal. In 2011 Morgan denied having ever hacked a phone or "to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone". In 2012 he was heavily criticised in the findings of the Leveson Inquiry, when the chair Brian Leveson stated that comments made in Morgan's testimony about phone hacking were "utterly unpersuasive" and "clearly prove ... that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it". On television, he hosted Piers Morgan Live on CNN from 2011 to 2014, replacing Larry King Live in the timeslot following King's retirement. He was a judge on America's Got Talent and Britain's Got Talent. In 2008, Morgan won the seventh season of the US Celebrity Apprentice. In the UK, he presents Piers Morgan's Life Stories (since 2009) and Good Morning Britain (since 2015). Morgan has written eight books, including four volumes of memoirs.