Piers Morgan Slams Former Colleague Anderson Cooper as ‘Poisonous’ During Megyn Kelly Appearance

British broadcaster Piers Morgan called out his former CNN colleague Anderson Cooper during a recent interview with Megyn Kelly.

During a Monday, March 23, chat, Morgan, 60, and Kelly, 55, were bashing CNN’s apparent pivot towards podcast-style programming, when the Piers Morgan Uncensored host called Cooper a “poisonous little backstabber.”

“Immitation is the most sincere form of flattery. They are trying to look like us. When I see someone like Anderson Cooper…rolling his sleeves up with his big ol’ microphone trying to be Edward Murrow,” Morgan laughed in a clip shared via Instagram.

He continued, “Anderson Cooper has never expressed an opinion worth listening to anyway, but that’s why people turn to us. No one is controlling us. We say what we believe in the moment.”

Morgan joined CNN in January 2011 as a replacement for longtime host Larry King in the network’s evening lineup. Due to poor ratings, Piers Morgan Live was cancelled after just three seasons, according to a 2014 report from The Guardian.

“Could I have done with a better lead-in? Yes,” Morgan told Politico at the time. “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.”

CNN host Jake Tapper explained that the podcast-style shift in filming locations from the studio to his personal office is “an experiment.”

“This is my actual desk where I do my actual work, not the desk in the studio,” he shared. “And we thought we would bring you into the space where me and my team do our actual journalism and plan the show every day.”