Piers Morgan: What CNN Needs Is Megyn Kelly

Now that he’s landed a U.S. editor-at-large gig with the Daily Mail Online, Piers Morgan is dishing some advice to his former employer, CNN.

Morgan offered his take on how to steer his old network forward in an “advice column” published Wednesday in The Hollywood Reporter: forget about ratings and hire Megyn Kelly, or someone like her.

“CNN has many good anchors, but it needs to find more of its own Megyn Kellys,” he wrote.

Morgan praised cable stars like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly for both having a point of view and communicating that point of view in an entertaining way. But he singled out O’Reilly’s Fox colleague as the model anchor for CNN.

“I suggested to Jeff that Megyn Kelly would be a perfect primetime star for CNN — young, beautiful, slick, razor smart, bursting with opinions, humor and authority,” he wrote. “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 O’Reilly. Jeff nodded and replied, ‘I tried to get her.’ Days later, it was announced Megyn was moving to Fox News primetime, where she’s been a huge hit.”

Morgan parted ways with CNN in September, months after his primetime talk show was cancelled for its poor ratings, but there doesn’t appear to be too much bad blood between Morgan and the network over the split: “I wish Jeff and CNN every success. I enjoyed almost all my time there,” he wrote in the column.