By Sheila Mckenzie-
Piers Morgan has seized his golden opportunity to attack Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, both of whom he has accused of being hypocritical.
In his new column for The Sun, Piers expressed his views on the Sussexes, after the couple demanded the platform remove well known podcaster Joe Rogan.
“In a new low, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have demanded the Swedish streaming platform — which paid them $25 million last year to do their own podcast — do something about Rogan’s ‘rampant misinformation.’
“Sorry, WHAT? A pair of two-bit minor British royal family renegades best known for spewing outrageously harmful misinformation to Oprah Winfrey are trying to suppress an American’s First Amendment right to free speech?”
“How dare she and her equally hypocritical husband, Harry, make any demands from a company that’s paid them a fortune to so far produce one podcast that was so bad, I needed urgent brain cell restoration surgery after enduring it?
“If the choice of whom to listen to in America is a curious, smart man who listens to myriad views to get to the truth, or a pair of fork-tongued, woke wastrels whose only currency is trashing the royal institution that gave them their titles to exploit for vast financial gain, give me the former anytime.”
Joe Rogan came under fire last week for his misinformation on COVID-19 and his anti-vax claims, but Piers Morgan expressed his support for Rogan and praised his “fierce curiosity” despite being at the centre of a “ferocious firestorm driven by the permanently outraged woke brigade”.
Rogan has been under criticism for interviewing widely discredited doctor Robert Malone, who claimed on his show The Joe Rogan Experience that Americans were “hypnotised” into wearing masks and getting vaccines.
Soon after that, hundreds of scientists, medical professionals, and famous personalities like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle started asking Spotify to address Covid misinformation on Rogan’s episodes about vaccines.
Shortly after Neil Young pulled his music from the streaming service due to alleged inaccuracies about COVID-19, Harry, 37, and Meghan, 40, are now calling on Spotify to address the “serious harms” of misinformation featured on the platform.
The couple first contacted the company to express their concerns about “the all-too-real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform” in April 2021, a spokesperson for their foundation Archewell said on Sunday.
Spotify first announced a partnership with the Sussexes in December 2020. According to a press release issued at the time, Harry and Meghan “will host and produce podcasts that build community through shared experience, narratives, and values.” Thus far, the Sussexes have only released one 33-minute holiday episode, and have yet to publicly announce further projects with Spotify. It’s unclear if this delay in new content is related to misinformation about the platform, or when additional podcasts might be released by the Sussexes.
On Monday (31 January), Rogan, who is also a UFC commentator, finally responded to this controversy in an almost 10-minute long video where he defended his podcast guests by stating their credentials and gave a reason behind why he invited them to his show.
Pool/Sammie Hussein GettyImages
“Dr McCullough is a cardiologist and he is the most published physician in his field in history,” Rogan said. “Dr Malone owns nine patents on the creation of the mRNA vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to [creation of] mRNA vaccines.”
“Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, and very accomplished people, and they have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is,” he added.
Soon after Rogan’s statement, Morgan compared the American podcaster to himself.
“Rogan’s got an open mind; like me, he doesn’t park himself into any particular political or social tribe, nor does he like or dislike people according to their partisan allegiance,” he wrote in his column for the New York
Joe Rogan released a 10-minute video defending himself Sunday as pressure mounts against him and Spotify over his podcast’s COVID-19 content. He said those who don’t listen to his hit podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” might have “a distorted perception” of him “based on sound bites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging.”
“The problem that I have with misinformation, especially today, is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact,” said Rogan, whose recent episodes on COVID-19 regulations and vaccines caused Neil Young to pull his music from Spotify in protest. Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren threatened to pull theirs, too, and Spotify announced this weekend that a disclaimer will now air before Rogan’s show.