Earlier this week, British broadcaster Piers Morgan said that he was giving up his live, daily, hour-long evening news show on TalkTV for YouTube. “I’ve just decided that I no longer want to create my show for linear television — I just want to go full digital globally,” adding that he did not want to be placed in an “unnecessary straitjacket”. But new reporting by Guido Fawkes puts Morgan’s departure in a slightly different light. “Don’t believe the spin,” Guido writes. “TalkTV is being pared back, the single biggest budget line item was Piers and he wasn’t delivering an audience to match his ego”. Either way, YouTube is probably a more natural domain for some of Piers’ very online interviews.

Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024

At the time of writing, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin has racked up over 125 million impressions on X. The first 25 minutes were almost entirely devoted to the Russian President’s lecture on 800 years of Slavic history, which we’ll leave to the Kremlinologists to fact-check. But commentators were quick to compare Putin’s mental acuity with Joe Biden’s lack thereof. At around the same time the interview was published, the US president gave a press conference in which he defended his “fine memory”… by going on to confuse the Mexican and Egyptian leaders. The 2024 election is already shaping up to be one of the wildest yet…

A UK court ruled today that former Green Party co-leader Shahrar Ali was illegally discriminated against for his gender critical beliefs. As Joan Smith writes for UnHerd, this morning’s judgment is the latest in a series of legal wins for individuals with gender-critical beliefs, and has far-reaching implications for political parties in this country. All are now discovering that there will be a legal cost for failing to protect individuals for holding the outrageously extreme view that biological sex is real. Will Labour’s Rosie Duffield be next?