“People who tap people’s phones, people who take secret photographs...who do all that very nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff—how did you feel about that?” 
 
 Morgan’s response: “Well, to be honest, let’s put that into perspective as well. Not a lot of that went on…A lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves.” But, in an admission Morgan more recently has steered clear of, he added: “That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work.” 
 
 Morgan, who since January has been hosting CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight in the 9 p.m. time slot formerly occupied by Larry King Live, was making an apparent reference to Fleet Street’s frequent use of private investigators to obtain personal information on celebrities, government officials, and other subjects of sensational stories. Mr Morgan, a former News of the World and Daily Mirror editor who is now a high-profile television presenter in the US , has spent the past week categorically denying ever printing material derived from phone hacking . "I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to, and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do,” he told the programme's host, Kirsty Young. “I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide, and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the supposed newspaper market.” 
 
 Piers Morgan on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs - 7 June 2009 (mp3) 
 
 The discovery of Mr Morgan’s comment, first hinted at by the Guido Fawkes political blog, came after Trinity Mirror, the parent company of The Daily Mirror, announced it had opened an investigation into editorial standards at its newspapers in light of the phone hacking scandal. Clive Goodman, a reporter for The News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the newspaper, were jailed in 2007 for illegally hacking mobile phone voicemails. As we reported Tuesday, a British blogger claimed to have a recording of Morgan that–he said–”contracts” Morgans flat denials that he ever “hacked a phone, told anybody to hack a phone or published any story based on the hacking of a phone.” As it turns out, that recording’s a 2009 interview Morgan gave to the BBC, appearing on a radio show, Desert Island Discs.The host, Kirsty Young asked Morgan about “all that nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff” that Morgan was exposed to by being a tabloid newspaper editor. In the interview—which was supplied by British blogger Guido Fawkes to The Daily Beast—Morgan described his attitude toward journalism in 1994, when Rupert Murdoch appointed him the youngest editor ever of News of the World, Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday tabloid that Murdoch shut down July 10 amid the scandal, after 168 years in print.
– Did Piers Morgan sanction a bit of phone hacking while in charge of the Daily Mirror? The CNN host has been denying it all week, after a British lawmaker accused him of it. But now, audio has surfaced online of a 2009 radio interview in which Morgan seems to admit to doing just that, the Telegraph reports. In the clip, first reported by the “Guido Fawkes” blog and the Daily Beast, Morgan is asked how he felt about “down-in-the-gutter” journalism tactics like phone hacking. “To be honest … not a lot of that went on,” Morgan replied. “A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work.” Today Morgan told Mediaite that the comments were just “a general observation about tabloid newspaper reporters,” and not an admission of phone hacking specifically.