Many champion Morgan’s ongoing dedication to the gun issue. | John Shinkle/POLITICO POLITICO interviews Piers Morgan

To Piers Morgan, the answer is simple: pro-gun advocate and conservative radio show host Alex Jones was the best guest he ever had.

“The best thing about Alex Jones is that 8 million people watched that video on YouTube,” Morgan told POLITICO in an extensive interview at his CNN office in New York. “I would suggest it’s the smartest booking we’ve ever made. The attention that interview got exploded this issue back onto the agenda for the entire week leading up to what Obama did today.”


( PHOTOS: Piers Morgan)

“The president of the United States espoused exactly what I’ve been saying for the last five weeks,” Morgan continued, referring to the President Barack Obama’s proposed ban on assault weapons. “No one can tell me we haven’t had an influence.”

Morgan’s show has been on air for two years, but it’s only in the past five weeks, since the shooting in Newtown, Conn., that the CNN host is getting any real attention. In a departure from the down-the-middle ethos that has governed CNN since its inception, the highly opinionated Brit has been an outspoken advocate of gun control, inviting his opponents on air night after night — alongside mayors, scholars, law enforcement officials and pundits — to entertain their argument against tighter gun laws while publicly admonishing them for it, even referring to some of them as “idiots.”

( PHOTOS: Politicians speak out on gun control)

Many champion Morgan’s ongoing dedication to the gun issue and his commitment to hearing out a multitude of voices. “I’m delighted that Piers has tackled our national public health crisis of gun violence. And if he can boost ratings while tackling a serious issue, more power to him,” Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist and a recent guest on the show, told POLITICO. “We need examples of TV shows that make money as well as make people think.”

But the approach grates on Morgan’s critics, who think he generates controversy for the sake of self-promotion. Larry King, who previously occupied Morgan’s chair at CNN, recently said the show was as much about Morgan as about his guests. Michael Moynihan, a columnist at The Daily Beast, likened Morgan’s booking of pro-gun “crazies” to Mike Tyson’s post-prison boxing matches, where weak opponents were sought out merely to bolster the former champion’s image. The blogger Andrew Sullivan, who has had it in for Morgan for years, accuses the host of broadcasting “a rolling freak-show designed entirely for ratings.”

( PHOTOS: Will these guns be banned again?)

Morgan, who describes himself as “deliberately provocative” and knows he has “a unique ability to rub certain people the wrong way,” doesn’t really care — or, in his native tongue, doesn’t give “a monkey’s cuss.”

“Andrew Sullivan is a dick,” Morgan told POLITICO. “He’s an extremely bitchy, deeply unpleasant, rather confused individual who for whatever reason despises the very spittle I put on the floor. Well, good luck to you, mate. But I couldn’t give a toss.”

On Larry King: “I’ve tried to be very respectful about Larry; he’s a legend, and I feel very proud to have followed him. But I think he just slightly needs to button it, because he’s talking nonsense. The reason we’re different is, I’m a journalist and he’s not. Larry isn’t a journalist, never has been.”

( Also on POLITICO: CNN President Jeff Zucker backs Morgan’s gun control campaign)

Both Morgan and his producer, Jonathan Wald, know that conflict is an essential ingredient for good television and are unabashed about their interest in ratings. On Wednesday, around the time that Obama was announcing his gun control proposals, Morgan was busy taping a segment with Charlie Sheen. Wald called it “Round 2,” a reference to the February 2011 interview which took place at the height of Sheen’s public meltdown.

When I asked Morgan why he had interviewed Sheen that day, Morgan described Sheen as “a compelling, fascinating, iconic figure in American cultural entertainment.”

“What is news?” Morgan asked. “There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don’t come from that school. I certainly appreciate those kinds of stories. I’ve certainly devoted a lot of time on my show to them. But I also have a much broader spectrum of what I think is interesting, relevant, current or newsworthy.”

Nothing damages Morgan’s brand among the “snobbish” and the “pompous” so much as this juxtaposition between the high-brow and the low-brow. Americans who have a hard time taking Morgan’s gun control debate seriously do so because the next time they tune in, they might see Dr. Oz or Barbara Streisand. Never mind that Morgan has also landed news-making interviews with U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, and the president of Iran.

“Why don’t people watch my interviews with Justice Scalia, President Clinton, President Carter, the Dalai Lama, Michael Bloomberg, any of the Republican candidates for the nominee race, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” Morgan said. “Go and watch those interviews and tell me that I just interview Dr. Oz, who I love, Barbara Streisand, who I love. Because I have no problem with interviewing both sets of people.”

Morgan particularly likes the gun control debate because it allows him to address a substantive issue while attracting audiences and influencing a national discussion.

“We are ultimately a cable television program. Of course ratings matter,” Morgan said. “What is heartening to me is that we’ve been getting very strong ratings by doing an issue where we are energizing the debate, and we are actually getting things happening.”

Morgan’s life, like his show, has oscillated between the serious and the frivolous. Morgan was an editor at the British tabloid the The Daily Mirror for 11 years and editor at News of the World, Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct paper, before that. Under Morgan, the Mirror produced award-winning coverage of 9/11 and the Iraq War. (Morgan was ultimately fired after publishing fake photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. “I refused to apologize or accept that we had necessarily been duped. I still don’t accept it — I’ve never seen the evidence,” he told POLITICO.)

On the other side, Morgan’s also been a co-host of America’s Got Talent and a guest on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice, in 2008 . (One headline from the time: “Relative unknown wins ‘Celebrity Apprentice’: Piers Morgan took the title, but he will soon be forgotten by the public.”) As with the guests on his show, it can be hard to reconcile the Piers Morgan who calls himself a journalist with the Piers Morgan who calls himself an entertainer.

During our interview, Morgan pulled up the ratings for Tuesday night’s town-hall show on guns and paired them against MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, whose show competes with Morgan’s at 9 p.m. and is the most-watched on that network.

“Last night’s ratings were the highest we’ve had outside of a particular news event in a very long time,” he said. “We did a 273,000 in the [25-54-year-old] demo last night, and 815,000 in total viewers. Rachel Maddow did a 289,000 in the demo, 978,000 in total viewers. So we’re nipping at her heels.”

“It’s been a bumpy ride,” he continued. “But Bill O’Reilly took three or four years to get going at Fox. Rachel Maddow the same at MSNBC. It’s particularly difficult when you’re replacing a legend like Larry King. But I now feel that the atmosphere in the building is as competitive as I’ve known it.”

In an address to New York staff earlier this week, incoming CNN president Jeff Zucker expressed support for Morgan’s decision to take a stance on the gun control issue, Morgan said. He also said that CNN needed more personality and more differentiation — all signs that Morgan’s approach is emblematic of the network’s future.

“Jeff Zucker believes you’ve got to be unafraid to expand the breadth of what news is,” he said. “There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn’t have to be just war and famine and serious politics. And CNN has veered too much to that in the past few years, and been too afraid to go after other stories.”

“We’re still the best when it matters, when the big stuff happens. But we have been a little bit slow to react to the competition, and we should have more personalities on the network unafraid to express opinions,” he continued. “It should be more lively, independent programming, unique to each hour. Because when there’s not much happening, having that on a repeat cycle hour after hour after hour is dull television.”

Asked if he believed that he could one day compete with the likes of O’Reilly and Maddow, Morgan said, “absolutely.”

“Bill O’Reilly is like a comfortable pair of shimmeringly angry slippers, but you know every night what you’re going to get,” Morgan said. “It’s consistent. It hits all the right buttons if you like that kind of thing. And while I don’t agree with a lot of it, I thoroughly enjoy watching it and can admire the professionalism. The same with Rachel Maddow, I can watch it without agreeing with some of the things she says, but absolutely admire the professionalism.”

I asked Morgan if there was a governing principle to his own show, something that gave him an edge to make up for the lack of O’Reilly and Maddow’s partisanship.

“I prefer to be a slightly uncomfortable pair of slippers,” he continued. “You’re going to come to it every night, but it’s not going to be the smoothest pair of slippers you’ve ever tried on.

“I’d like it to be edgy and provocative and challenging,” Morgan added. ”When you’ve had a week of that maybe on a Friday night you have an hour of me and Charlie Sheen just sitting back and riffing about life in the Universe, you watch it for an hour, and rather than be some pompous, D.C., political hack, whose never done anything else in his life, who sits there going, Why isn’t he only asking him about the debt ceiling!? — which is possibly the most boring story in the history of politics — they can actually watch an hour of Charlie Sheen and think, that was fascinating and entertaining and funny, and above all, great television.”