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December 20th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda 
Dave Hogan / Getty Images, file
Former Daily Mirror and News of the World editor Piers Morgan and Rebekah Brooks (then Rebekah Wade), editor of the Sun newspaper, at the book launch party for Piers Morgan’s memoirs, entitled “The Insider,” on March 9, 2005 in London.
LONDON — Former News of the World editor and CNN interviewer Piers Morgan will appear by videolink from the United States on Tuesday at a judge-led investigation into the ethics and practices of Britain’s scandal-tarred press.
He is expected to be grilled about comments he has made about widespread phone hacking at tabloid newspapers.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp shut down the News of the World in July after a public outcry over the phone-hacking practices by British journalists at the newspaper.
Morgan’s appearance, along with a number of other witnesses Tuesday, has been widely anticipated and critics have been picking through old interviews and Morgan’s autobiography “The Insider,” in which the 46-year-old Morgan makes clear he knew of phone hacking as long ago as 2001.
In an interview for GQ magazine before the public scandal over the practice, Morgan said he couldn’t get too upset over hacking because “loads of newspaper journalists were doing it.”
And, in an earlier interview for BBC radio unearthed by one of his critics, Morgan appeared to go further, saying it was difficult to condemn private eyes hired to hack into people’s phones “because obviously you were running the results of their work.”
Morgan maintains that he has never participated in phone hacking or knowingly run a story based on an illegally intercepted message.
“I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone,” he said in a statement in August.
Actors Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and singer Charlotte Church are among those who have given evidence about press abuse, while executives and lawyers for Murdoch’s News Corp have defended the newspaper.
From newspaper man to TV star
Morgan shot to national prominence when he was picked by Murdoch to run the News of the World at age 28. Under his tenure, the tabloid exposed Grant’s liaison with Hollywood prostitute Divine Brown and Princess Diana’s late-night phone calls to married art dealer Oliver Hoare.
It wasn’t all down to good reporting: Morgan has acknowledged that bribes were paid to informants on rival titles.
In 1995, Morgan left the News of the World for the Daily Mirror. His time there was marked by scoops and controversy, including an insider trading scandal.
Among the newspapers to report it was The Independent, which said he allegedly bought 20,000 pounds ($31,000) worth of shares in a technology company the day before it was tipped in the newspaper’s investment column. While two other journalists at the Daily Mirror were jailed, Morgan was not charged and kept his job.
However, his editorship at the Daily Mirror ended in 2004 when he ran a faked photograph purporting to show a British soldier urinating on an Iraqi detainee.
Morgan won a second life as a TV personality, eventually signing on as a judge of “America’s Got Talent” and taking Larry King’s old spot at CNN. So far, he’s prospered. Ratings for “Piers Morgan Tonight” have been up 9 percent on last year’s figures — good if not spectacular — and he appears to be reaching a younger audience.
CNN spokeswoman Barbara Levin said the network was “extremely pleased” with how Morgan’s program was performing and the company has so far stood by its star even as the phone-hacking scandal threatens to draw him in.
‘Despicable human being’
“So heartwarming that everyone in U.K.’s missing me so much they want me to come home,” Morgan joked earlier this year amid demands he return to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.
Morgan’s denial that he has had nothing to do with phone hacking is hard to square with a 2006 article in which he said he’d been played a phone message that former Beatle Paul McCartney left for his now ex-wife Heather Mills in the wake of one of their fights.
“It was heartbreaking,” Morgan wrote of the tape, saying that McCartney “sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work It Out’ into the answerphone.”
How did Morgan come to hear the tape? He’s refused to say, but Mills told the BBC in August that “there was absolutely no honest way” he could have obtained the recording. McCartney echoed her sentiment, saying he’d apparently been hacked.
Morgan’s autobiography also abounds with tantalizing references to questionably obtained material: There’s “a dodgy transcript of a phone conversation” and a celebrity’s stolen laptop.
And when actress Kate Winslet demanded to know how Morgan got her cell phone number, which she had only just changed, Morgan shrugged it off.
“Look, Kate,” he joked, “You don’t get to be the editor of the Mirror without being a fairly despicable human being.”
More from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- Will younger Kim’s aunt and uncle be North Korea puppet masters?
- Mourning in North Korea, worries in South after Kim Jong Il’s death
- Who’s in charge? Mixed signals from Egypt’s rulers
- Troops move out of Iraq … then next stop is home
- Manning and WikiLeaks: New push for whistleblower protections
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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