There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

[UPDATE: The news became official Thursday morning:

“I am thrilled,” says ex-NBC Universal chief and next #CNN president Jeff Zucker. on.cnn.com/Ya29uK

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) November 29, 2012

The choice of Zucker, whose impending hiring was first reported today by the LA Times and then by the NY Times, to lead CNN seems at first blush to be a strange choice by parent company Time Warner.

Although he presided over the long-running success of the Today show, Zucker has been away from the news business for a decade and away from NBC for two years. At a time when TV is being disrupted by new platforms and social media, Zucker very much fits the mold of an old-line TV executive — such as his new boss at Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, who has repeatedly downplayed the threat of so-called cord-cutters to the business.

This doesn’t mean Zucker will not succeed. It just means he will have to navigate waves of disruptive technology while also finding an identity for CNN.

The network has floundered in recent years and can only pull in an audience for brief spurts during a major news event like a war or presidential election. In the meantime, rivals like Fox and MSNBC have carved out a role as partisan squawk boxes for liberals or conservatives. Here’s some Twitter reaction:

My Old Boss is my New Boss RT @brianstelter Jeff Zucker new president of CNN Worldwide, people close to him & CNN say nyti.ms/WXBxf4

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 28, 2012

CNN overall has its most profitable year, despite disaster of its US flagship nyti.ms/U1ywTZ I love CNNi & CNN.com

— Rosental(@Rosental) November 28, 2012

“They don’t want to be Fox and they don’t want to be MSNBC. Fine. But neither nor is not an identity.” –@jayrosen_nyunyti.ms/Tl6PWU

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 28, 2012

(Image by Katherine Welles via Shutterstock)

Social media, once thought of as a tool for bored nerds and marketing gurus, has taken on a whole new role it seems — one that could stand to change the face of modern warfare forever. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army (a sentence I never would have imagined typing even a few years ago), the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began Wednesday morning, and the official Hamas account responded:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

In the hours that followed, videos of rocket attacks on Hamas strongholds were uploaded to YouTube, and the IDF blog carried a minute-by-minute breakdown of what was happening — how many Hamas rockets it intercepted, a strike by the Israeli Navy, and so on. It looked very much like the New York Times live-blog The Lede, except that it was being published by a military force: the front of the website even looks like a traditional news blog or breaking news site, complete with the usual social-media buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Not that long ago, CNN was the archetype of war reporting with its real-time video of the war in Iraq. More recently it has become the province of breaking-news blogs like The Lede from the Times, with minute-by-minute updates — or of National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, sifting through live reports from civilians in Tahrir Square in Egypt and using his Twitter stream like a crowdsourced newsroom. Now, we have to add to that the army as a media entity, as symbolized by the IDF’s official live blog, Twitter stream and YouTube videos. What more could a publisher want? There are even infographics and a hashtag.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written about how social media allows “the sources to go direct,” and we have seen the power that can have when a newsmaker adopts Twitter or a blog, the way News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has or the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But there is perhaps no better example of taking that principle to its logical — if unpleasant — conclusion than what the Israeli Defense Forces did on Wednesday. How does that change the way that wars are waged, or experienced, or covered by journalists? It is certain to do all three.

In print, this looks like extremists. On Twitter, this looks mainstream. Dangerous how diff platforms lead to diff conclusions.

—
Andrew Katz (@katz) November 14, 2012

Governments and armies have always tried to influence the way their battles are perceived, whether by “embedding” journalists or by creating their own mouthpieces — people like Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, who broadcast favorable messages as a way of destabilizing the enemy or turning the tide of public opinion (or both). But now, commanders and their political chiefs have tools at their disposal that would have been almost unthinkable even a decade ago: all the same tools that a newspaper or a TV network has, and probably more. Their message now lives or dies by the same principles.

As more than one observer has pointed out, the main issue when armies become media entities is how to sort out the truth from the marketing spin — and how to ensure that the other side gets fair treatment, even though it may not have as powerful a marketing department. Just as NYT media reporter Brian Stelter has said that having Rupert Murdoch on Twitter makes his job a lot harder, the advent of military publishers will likely force traditional war correspondents to up their game as well — and it will put even more emphasis on crowdsourced efforts like Andy Carvin’s Twitter newsroom.

@mathewi Feels like a watershed moment.

—
Jim Roberts (@nytjim) November 14, 2012

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

The company set up its monitoring service to track performance and availability of NBC, ABC, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, C-SPAN and other news sites as well as Twitter and Facebook from the Friday before election day onward. The monitors ran IE9 to mimic end-user experience from a half-dozen North American cities. The monitor visited each site every 5 minutes and recorded what a person would have experienced if she had been clicking on the site at that time. The monitors captured and logged HTTP errors, connection failures and “excessively slow” page load times, according to a Yottaa blog post.

And boy, some of those load times got extremely and excessively slow as election day wore on. From 7 pm ET until Wednesday 2 am ET, most of the news sites “came to a halt,” according to Yottaa. Some “consistently took as long as 50 seconds to 60 seconds to load.”

I can attest to that. Passing through the Charlotte, NC airport at around 9 pm, I was unable to get updated news from any of the major web sites, including CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post. In fact, I ended up relying on text updates from friends who were glued to their sets in Boston. (The other alternative would have been to belly up to the bar and watch Fox News, but we all have our limits.)

The election took its toll on Twitter and Facebook as well. These pages usually load in less than 5 seconds but on Tuesday night, President Obama’s Facebook page’s load times slowed to 25 seconds after 11 pm ET and didn’t recover till after 1 am ET.

Really poor showing by major news sites

For the five days up to and including election day, the monitor found 3,800 total errors — things like HTTP errors, connection time outs etc — 80 percent of those occurred on Tuesday. The average increase in errors across all sites from Monday to Tuesday was more than 500 percent, but the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Fox News each showed increases of more than 1,500 percent.

And the winners are …

Based on its monitors, Yottaa deemed C-SPAN and CNN as the most consistent and reliable sites across the board. Each had its share of errors and performance issues but they paled in comparison to those of other media sites.

Of course, I’m sure Cambridge, Mass.-based Yottaa, which offers web site performance optimization services would love to sell them some technology to correct these issues.

Last month, the blog Newsbusters discovered that a large chunk of a piece that Zakaria wrote for Time magazine about gun control was almost identical to sections from a New Yorker piece on the same topic, written by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was subsequently suspended by both Time and CNN (although he has recently been reinstated after both entities said they found no evidence of further plagiarism). Lehrer, meanwhile — a high-profile author — was fired by resigned from the New Yorker after it was discovered that he had duplicated information from a number of sources.

Plagiarism is just inefficient hyperlinking

One of the themes that has been brought up repeatedly in stories about both Zakaria and Lehrer is the idea that they have been overworked as a result of media multi-tasking. Stories about the Lehrer incident, for example, note that he was writing books and had a packed public-speaking schedule while also trying to write a blog for the New Yorker, and Zakaria made the same link by saying he plans to cut down on his responsibilities — implying that this was to blame for him mixing up his notes from the New Yorker piece with his own writing (he also said he recently hired an assistant).

But I think Box.net CEO Aaron Levie put his finger on a big part of the problem in a tweet he posted recently, in which he said plagiarism “is just really inefficient hyperlinking.”

Plagiarism is just really inefficient hyperlinking.

—
Aaron Levie (@levie) August 10, 2012

Although he probably just intended to be witty, I think Levie makes a good point. Plagiarism is defined as the attempt to “steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own,” and it is the last part of that definition that is the most important one. It isn’t so much that a writer like Lehrer or Zakaria takes information from someone else and uses it in a column — plenty of writers do that, and as the media world has exploded thanks to social tools such as blogs and Twitter, this phenomenon has only become more commonplace. But neither of them gave credit to the source of the content they used, and that was the real crime.

This is exactly the same kind of argument that gets made about news aggregators or blogs that do a poor job of crediting the source of the content they are aggregating. As Jeff Jarvis has argued in a series of recent posts, since copying is rampant on the internet, we should be more focused on ways of giving credit to the source or creator of that content. And what better way to give credit than by linking prominently to its originator? This is just another reason why links are the lifeblood of the internet, as I argued in a recent post about the back-and-forth between bloggers and the traditional media over the latter never giving credit to the former.

Linking also provides a great defence

If either Zakaria or Lehrer had been more devoted to the idea of linking to sources, they might have spent more time making note of where the information they were using came from, so that they could include a link — in the same way that academics routinely cite footnotes to back up their claims. Would they still have tried to pass those sections off as their own? Perhaps. As my paidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted about Lehrer, some of his behavior was likely a result of the pressure to be a public intellectual. But if either one is sincere about how their plagiarism was an honest mistake, paying more attention to linking might help.

And if anyone needs evidence of how a consistent policy of linking to sources can be a positive thing, they should look no further than the Gawker case: the blog network was sued by a company for defamation, based on a piece that the tech blog Gizmodo wrote about its products. In a decision that acquitted the media company of this charge, the court said that part of the rationale for its ruling came from the use of links in the Gizmodo piece, which provided ample evidence of what the post was referring to. As the court decision put it:

“Having ready access to the same facts as the authors, readers were put in a position to draw their own conclusions about Redmond and his ventures and technologies… Statements are generally considered to be nonactionable opinion when the facts supporting the opinion are disclosed.”

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argued in a post about the journalistic principle of objectivity that “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” In other words, when you have the ability to link to information that supports your conclusions, it’s easier to get away with being subjective, because readers are able to follow the links and decide for themselves whether you are credible.

I think the same principle applies to plagiarism: it is something that occurs when a medium doesn’t allow — or at least doesn’t encourage — links to original sources. The internet may make it more likely that someone copies content from another, but it also makes it easier to fix.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user skedonk

Zite was already working with CNN (its parent company), Fox Sports, the Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Bleacher Report, HLNtv, Motley Fool, The Next Web and VentureBeat.

Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, which is available for iPad, iPhone and Android. Like the rest of the content delivered through Zite, partner publishers’ content is subject to an algorithm that delivers personalized stories to users based on their likes and dislikes.

Publishers don’t pay Zite to be included in the program. “We believe there is adequate value being created for both parties in the terms of the agreement,” a company spokeswoman said.

Zite’s competitors are also entering into more partnerships with publishers, though their business models work in different ways. The New York Times is now making its content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard as part of its “NYT Everywhere” program, with Flipboard’s revenue derived from advertising. Pulse partnered with the Wall Street Journal  to offer content subscriptions through its app and is sharing the subscription revenue.

The landmark Supreme Court decision on health care that was handed down on Thursday was the kind of news event that everyone knows is coming, like an Apple product launch or the Facebook IPO. In those kinds of cases, there’s an almost overwhelming desire on the part of the media to be first with the definitive statement about what happened, and Twitter has only increased that pressure because it allows anyone to publish instantaneously. CNN seems to have buckled under the strain, since it got the ruling wrong in its initial update — and to make matters worse it was beaten by an 81-year-old blogger. The incident provided even more ammunition (as if we needed any) for the ongoing debate over whether it is better to be right rather than first with the news, and whether the scoop as we know it is dead.

Within minutes of the 193-page decision being delivered to the media, CNN was reporting that the central portion of the legislation — the so-called “individual mandate” — had been struck down. It ran news alerts in the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen, and the news was repeated on Twitter by CNN journalists and the thousands of people who follow them. Even President Obama apparently saw the CNN news and thought that his law had been ruled unconstitutional, until his aides checked SCOTUSblog, a small blog run by a law firm whose lead analyst is an 81-year-old former newspaper reporter.

Was CNN practicing “news as a process”?

CNN was castigated by media insiders and plenty of others for its error, with some saying Twitter made a better and more reliable news source. Soon Gary He had doctored a photo of Harry Truman holding a newspaper reading “Dewey Defeats Truman” — probably one of the most famous examples of a rush to judgment by a media entity in modern history — to show President Obama holding an iPad with CNN’s webpage on it. The news channel continued to update its coverage, and apologized for getting the initial report wrong (something it is apparently now investigating), but it was already too late.

So was CNN wrong to sum up the decision before it had had time to fully decipher it? Before the ruling appeared, the New York Times warned followers on Twitter that it might not be as fast with the news as others, because it planned to spend some time making sense of it first — but then, the New York Times doesn’t have to run a 24-hour news channel and fill all that airtime. For many, the news network’s decision symbolized the downsides of the desire to be first instead of trying to be as correct as possible.

Others argue that CNN was simply trying to do what all media outlets have to do in the digital age, which is to report early and then update a story as quickly as possible. Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute said it was a good example of “news as a process,” in which a story develops as more information is known, rather than being produced as an artifact at a specific time. Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, however — who has helped popularize the concept — said that CNN was simply wrong, and that news as a process involves reporting whatever is known to be true as soon as it is known.

Jarvis says the desire to have a “scoop” is a form of media narcissism, rather than a desire to truly serve readers, and that the scoop is effectively dead. As I’ve pointed out, thanks to Twitter and the rapid pace of online publishing, the half-life of this kind of scoop continues to dwindle as the news cycle becomes compressed (journalism professor Jay Rosen has written about the different kinds of scoops, some of which he says matter more than others). Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review noted that Bloomberg was bragging about having beaten Associated Press with the news by just 24 seconds. Says Jarvis:

Journalists must think how they can best add value to information, not how they can most rapidly repeat it. Explaining the story is adding value. Getting it wrong detracts value and devalues credibility.

Some news events are a process, but some aren’t

I think Jarvis is right that “news as a process” is a different beast than what CNN did in this case. In the aftermath of a tornado in Missouri last year, Brian Stelter used his Tumblr blog to detail his reporting on the event, adding information and photos and interviews as he went — and in the same way, Andy Carvin of National Public Radio used Twitter as a verification engine during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, posting things he wasn’t sure of and asking his followers for help in arriving at the truth. Both of these are fundamentally different than reporting on a Supreme Court decision that everyone knows is coming, and which everyone has a copy of at the same time.

CNN has been criticized in the past for waiting too long to report things — including the death of Osama bin Laden last year, which most of Twitter knew was a reality (thanks in part to a retweet by Brian Stelter) long before Wolf Blitzer announced it on television. Perhaps that spooked the network and made it a little too eager to jump to conclusions. Or maybe its legal-affairs analyst just got it wrong and it was up on the screen before anyone could stop it. Rightly or wrongly, many viewers and media analysts expect CNN to be a bit better with its rapid analysis than an 81-year-old blogger or someone on Twitter.

In a sense, I think Steve Myers is right when he says that it’s all about the expectations of your intended audience: if you are Andy Carvin and a news story is breaking halfway around the world, in a region engulfed in chaos — or if you are Brian Stelter in the aftermath of a tornado — readers or viewers are probably willing to cut you a lot of slack when it comes to the facts. But when you have a decision printed on paper and all you have to do is read and understand it, they are probably going to be less forgiving.

As the news cycle continues to dwindle and the life-span of a scoop gets shorter and shorter, the pressure on media outlets like CNN is only going to intensify, and they are going to have to decide whether they would rather run the risk of being spectacularly wrong — or be satisfied with being slow but confident that they are right.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Yan Arief Purwanto and Petteri Sulonen and Gary He of Insider Images

Salmon reported late Sunday that CNN is buying Mashable, the consumer social media news site that has been branching out into other verticals, for more than $200 million with an announcement due Tuesday. Turner has been shopping for good digital fits with CNN, which acquired personalized aggregater Zite last August, and has had talks with Mashable, among others.

But a source familiar with the situation describes the report of a deal as a rumor and tells paidContent no announcement is scheduled.

Mashable, founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005 as a 19-year-old blogger, and CNN, already one of its partners, could be a good fit in a number of ways. In addition to more than 15 million monthly visitors, Mashable has more than four million social media followers across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ et al and a high profile with consumers. It’s held conferences at Disney (NYSE: DIS) World and on a cruise ship, while its SXSW party draws more attendance than several tech brands combined.

The report and particularly the valuation captured instant interest and some skepticism. While I wouldn’t be surprised to see CNN wind up with Mashable, I don’t see Turner paying $200 million — or even coming close — for it.

Update: A couple of notes in the light of day: Mashable could get close to $200 million if the valuation is at the highest range times earnings. Would it come as a flat payout? An earnout based on post-deal performance might make the most sense for Turner. Also this morning, Brian Stelter reports that talks are ongoing, which tracks with what I’ve been hearing. Will a deal actually come of it? As I know all too well there are moments when deals can look very close — and when they might not be as close as they seem. Felix may turn out to be right on everything but the scheduled announcement. The numbers may vary. Or it may not happen at all.

Just to lay it all out there, TechCrunch offers a second or third hand report that (I’m not sure) Pete Cashmore is telling Mashable senior staffers the acquisition rumor isn’t true. Which, of course, doesn’t mean an acquisition isn’t happening.

Wouldn’t be surprised if CNN did buy Mashable. But for $200 million? Wow. I want that valuation! So say we all bit.ly/zhEKov

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 12, 2012

Jeez, who is surprised? They’ve practically been in bed for last 2-3 years. Price is fantastical. CNN buying Mashable? reut.rs/zNnmWx

— Rafat Ali (@rafat) March 12, 2012

It’s not the first deal that CNN-owned Zite has cut with a sponsor: last year Lululemon created a custom section of the application focusing on yoga-related content. But Intel will sponsor an existing section, one that Zite said in a blog post was one of its most popular sections.

Zite said the Intel deal won’t affect how stories are personalized using its algorithm but stories from Intel’s MyLifeScoop will get prominent placement inside the tech section, as seen in the screenshot below provided by the company. Turning on advertising within a news application known for curating content based on one’s preferences is a tricky affair, and Zite said that “we’ll also continue to respect your choice to block sources when it comes to promoted content.”

When CNN signed Morgan to replace the venerable Larry King as its primetime interviewer, “they haven’t hired Mother Teresa,” as Morgan himself put it. But until the abuses of the British press were brought so sharply to light earlier this year, CNN surely did not realise what it had got itself into.

Thanks to Jay and the Leveson inquiry into the seamy underside of the British media, CNN now knows a lot more than it did when it signed Morgan to a multimillion-dollar contract in 2010.

Repeatedly pressed by Jay and Leveson to explain his past statements and career – which may or may not have involved phone hacking – Morgan’s memory became worryingly unreliable. By the end of Jay’s questioning the imperious interviewer familiar to viewers of Piers Morgan Tonight was reduced to sullen, one-word answers delivered with curt annoyance.

The difficult question for CNN is: what does it do with Piers Morgan now?

As the excesses of Britain’s tabloids came to light in the US media, CNN replied to enquiries that “Piers Morgan has been firm and specific in his denial, and we continue to be supportive of his programme.”

Morgan himself flatly denied any involvement: “I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone.”

But as a witness at the Leveson inquiry, when asked to explain his guide to hacking into telephone voicemail from a 2001 entry in his own published memoirs, Morgan said: “I’m sorry – it was 10 years ago, I can’t remember.” Questioned further, Morgan couldn’t offer even the vaguest recollection where the “little trick” might have come from.

Confronted with a statement that he had heard voicemail messages left by Paul McCartney on Heather Mills’s phone, Morgan clammed up, saying “I’m not going to discuss where I heard it or who played it to me.”

And so it continued, with Morgan saying his knowledge of phone hacking was merely from hearing rumours, that as editor of the News of the World or the Daily Mirror he was never “directly involved” in the hiring of private investigators.

Most eyebrow-raising was over Morgan’s claim that, as editor, he only knew “5 percent of what his journalists are up to at any given time”. That may be true in a general sense but given tabloid culture’s famously hands-on editors, the real question is what that 5 percent may have included – and that’s what Morgan’s new bosses at CNN would dearly like to know.

A CNN source told the Wall Street Journal in August that the network’s executives had closely read Morgan’s memoirs and questioned him about his career:

A lot of the questioning, this person said, surrounded not telephone-hacking practices but Mr Morgan’s firing from the Mirror in 2004, after he authorised the newspaper’s publication of photographs showing Iraqis being abused by British soldiers that the British army alleged were fakes.

If CNN didn’t do enough due diligence a year ago, the Leveson inquiry is doing that job for it. And it comes at a time when Morgan’s ratings are diving – although there is no way of knowing if Morgan’s tainted past as a British tabloid editor has contributed to his failure.

In the most recent month, November, Morgan’s ratings declined to their lowest point since he replaced King, lagging in third place far behind Fox News’s Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in the daily 9pm slot.

Come January, Piers Morgan Tonight will no longer enjoy its year-on-year comparison with the feeble ratings of King’s last spell in the interviewer’s chair. At that point CNN may decide that the baggage is not worth the fare. Especially as Leveson is now hinting at calling Heather Mills as a witness – and her memory may be much clearer than Morgan’s.

This article originally appeared in The Guardian.