Sharon Osbourne Says CBS Told Her Co-Hosts to ‘Blindside’ Her About Piers Morgan

The Talk shut down production for two days because Sharon Osbourne defended Piers Morgan’s right to make a twat out of himself. The discussion around “cancel culture” kind of gets old because roughly 50% of the time it’s someone who complains that Fox News is too liberal saying “You can’t even call a black person the n-word without consequences anymore, I thought this was America!” But then something like this happens and makes national headlines and reminds that yes, sometimes there is a problem here.

Let me give you some backstory here. Piers Morgan is mad that Meghan Markle stopped being his friend when she started dating Prince Harry, and instead of going “oh well, makes sense, I was implicated in a massive phone hacking scandal that involved members of the Royal Family, I can see how that would be a problem,” he, like the rest of the British press, devoted an increasing amount of time to attacking her over basically anything. This culminated in him quitting Good Morning Britain to spend more time being a twat with his family. Sharon Osbourne said on The Talk, essentially, that she didn’t agree with what he said, specifically when he said she was lying about having suicidal ideation, but that Piers was her friend and he had a right to his opinion.

This is what caused The Talk to shut down while CBS investigates, presumably whether people do in fact have the right to be twats and have idiotic opinions (they do).

According to what Osbourne told Variety, the entire segment was set up by CBS execs who presumably thought it would be good television to have her co-hosts attack her and call her racist.

“I blame the network for it,” Osbourne told Variety on Friday night. “I was blindsided, totally blindsided by the whole situation. In my 11 years, this was the first time I was not involved with the planning of the segment.”

Osbourne says about eight minutes before the show began on Wednesday, a showrunners called and ask her if it was OK if they asked about Morgan. “I said, ‘Sure, they can ask me whatever.’ But then I get on there, I say my piece and Sheryl [Underwood] turns around straight-faced, looks at me and is reading from a card with questions. I was just so hurt, caught off guard and stunned by what I was being asked and not prepared. I was honestly in shock. I felt like I was in front of a firing squad. I felt like a lamb held out for slaughter. … They had me there for 20 minutes.”

“I’m a big girl. I’m a professional,” she said. “However CBS blindsided me. I don’t know why they did it to me. The showrunners told me it came from executives to do this to me.”

My biggest problem here is that the whole thing was framed as “Piers Morgan was being racist and so you’re defending a racist by saying you disagree with him but he has the right to free speech.” Now, a lot of British people’s problem with the Duchess of Sussex is that she’s black, but that’s demonstratively not Piers Morgan’s problem with her. He had a personal relationship with the Duchess and his feelings are hurt that she cut him out.

These are the sorts of things that hurt your cause and allow people who have actually done bad things, like sexually harassing a bunch of women and lying about COVID death numbers, to claim they’re victims of “cancel culture” too.