Why is ITV saying goodbye to Alastair Stewart while Piers Morgan stays on the air?

ITN will likely miss the veteran broadcaster far more than the ITV brand gains from Morgan's outrageous shtick

Let’s begin with the point that matters most. Any media outlet is right to look into any complaints of racism – the sector as a whole has a diversity issue and more needs to be done to ensure the perspective of any platform’s entire audience is being taken on board and anytime a line is crossed the correct action must be taken.

In the case of veteran journalist Alastair Stewart, ITN has not confirmed the reasons for him stepping down other than to say it was due to “errors of judgement” on social media, but it comes weeks after a Twitter exchange with a black man in which Stewart quoted a Shakespeare passage including the phrase “angry ape”. Stewart has used the verse once before on Twitter in response to a user who was not identifiably black.

With such departures there are often other reasons below the surface which contribute and that of course may be the case with Stewart leaving. But if this incident was the sole reason, and given the press coverage the incident was likely to receive anyway, would a full on-air apology from Stewart, with a discussion about the problematic nature of his choice of words involving experts, have not been sufficient to pass such lessons onto millions of viewers? Minutes of airtime would be taken up with the story in either form. This could also have included some time away from the screen for Stewart given the seriousness of the matter.

Years spent in a job should never be an excuse for transgressions, but using Stewart’s decades of experience as a trusted broadcaster to reach millions may have led to a better outcome than the typical “broadcast colleagues defend Stewart” headlines.

But today I find myself more annoyed by the hypocrisy of ITN’s major shareholder ITV, which continues to allow Piers Morgan to be its box-office attraction, while Stewart is out. Morgan says outrageous things to an audience of millions every day – both via the television and his Twitter account – often with less of the nuance than a Shakespeare quote. I’m not accusing Morgan of racism, more that any number of his statements have caused a backlash of a similar scale to the Stewart case.

I know the job of a newsreader is different to what Morgan is employed to do. Broadcasters like Stewart are employed to be unimpeachable, whereas Morgan’s brief is to create outrage and talking points – a job that he is incredibly good at. Indeed, in the unlikely event this piece ends up in Morgan’s crosshairs, he would likely dismiss me as a snowflake who is merely using the situation as an opportune stick to beat him with.

But the double standards are there, however many caveats there are to place around it. From recent stories about him being sexist towards a weather presenter on Good Morning Britain – which Morgan hit back at – to his status as an anti-woke cheerleader on GMB, outrage is Morgan’s stock in trade. Going back, there was the time that Morgan tweeted in the wake of Muhammad Ali’s death that he said “more inflammatory/racist things about white people than Donald Trump ever has” – an interesting take. While in 2017 he wrote a column for the Mail Online saying that white girls should not be blamed for singing the n-word, we should blame the rap industry for it appearing in songs in the first place.

You could easily make the point that these are selected examples, but in reality there are too many examples to mention. Whether the standards for Stewart and Morgan are different, with Morgan given far more leeway to speak his mind given his role, the fact that Morgan can be painted as a mere rogue while Stewart is instantly out on his ear appears simply unfair.

Another broadcaster will be brought in to replace Stewart, with relatively little fuss once the initial Twitter-storm has died down – but ITV will miss his calm authority far more than the brand gains from Morgan’s inflammatory rhetoric.