PIERS MORGAN WANTED CNN TO REPLACE COOPER WITH MEGYN KELLY

Former CNN host Piers Morgan is blaming Anderson Cooper for the poor ratings that led to his being axed. Morgan, whose show was bookended by Cooper’s at 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. told Politico.com columnist Dylan Byers: "Could I have done with a better lead-in? Yes. … Anderson is a great field reporter, but does he drive big ratings at CNN, outside of a big news cycle? I don’t see any evidence of it. And yet, the whole bank was being bet on him at 8 and 10 o’clock." (A CNN spokesperson later responded: "For the 2 1/2 years that AC 360 served as the lead-in to Piers Morgan’s program on CNN, it always delivered a higher rating than Piers program. And for the 7 months that Piers Morgan’s program led into AC 360, 360 always delivered a higher rating than Piers’s program. It is sad that Piers is trying to find a new job by misrepresenting how he performed in his old one,") In a column for the Hollywood Reporter, Morgan went on to say that he had urged CNN President Jeff Zucker to hire Megyn Kelly to replace Cooper at 8:00 p.m. "I suggested to Jeff that Megyn Kelly would be a perfect prime-time star for CNN — young, beautiful, slick, razor smart, bursting with opinions, humor and authority," Morgan wrote on Wednesday. "I was convinced she’d give me a much better lead-in than Anderson Cooper, who for all his qualities as a reporter is stiff in a studio and gets annihilated in the ratings every night by [Bill] O’Reilly."