“It’s pretty rich,” former CNN host Piers Morgan tells Fox’s Tucker Carlson about the media’s treatment of Donald Trump, that the American media went after Donald Trump as hard as they did — including his former employer. Having helped create the Trump phenomenon, Morgan says, CNN and the rest of the media got increasingly “more and more virulent” as the election continued. Morgan makes an important distinction between on-air hosts and “lower level” producers at CNN, blaming the bias on the latter much more than the former, but says that overall, “it stank”:

“They weren’t even pretending,” Morgan says about the media in general, “to be anything but in the tank for Hillary Clinton.”

As for what happens now, Morgan says that both sides need to calm down and reflect. “I think there is fault on both sides here” for the current “dangerous and toxic” relationship between the Trump administration and the media. “I think that the media have got to start showing President Trump a bit more respect, and he in turn and his White House operation have got to show the media more respect — and they’ve all got to move on.”

Morgan makes an excellent point about the root of the problem in American media. In the UK, Morgan notes, media outlets make very little pretense of having no point of view, so readers and viewers can put their reporting in context. “It’s pretty balanced down the middle,” Morgan explains, with “as many left-wing papers in Britain as there are right-wing. In America, what I don’t like is this pretense from papers like the New York Times that somehow they are completely beyond any reproach when it comes to their coverage, that they are completely neutral. They’re not neutral,” Morgan declares, and then goes on to point out examples of editorial bias.

By the way, Morgan points out, the temper tantrums in the US over Trump’s win are also taking place in the UK over the Brexit vote. In both cases, the media seems to be cheerleading them to some extent, too. “It’s one of the great hissy fits of modern political times.” Yes, and it’s hardly a recipe for voters to take the opposition or the media more seriously. Be sure to watch it all.