Terry Moran was fired from ABC News last month after he went on a rant about White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
An ABC journalist @TerryMoran posted this absolutely vile smear of Stephen Miller. It’s dripping with hatred. Remember that every time you watch ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration.
As it happens, I know Stephen quite well. And he’s motivated by love of country. He’s… pic.twitter.com/hX93zKTWjy
— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 8, 2025
Moran has since launched a Substack site and last week he had some things to say about media bias at this old network. Were they biased? Well, yeah, of course they were.
Let’s talk about bias. I worked at ABC News for almost 28 years, and I’m proud to say that. A lot of good people do a lot of really good work there, and they try hard to get the story right. There were many days over the years when I’d watch a colleague at work, on-camera or behind the scenes, and I’d think: That’s how you do this. That is how you do a story that will really help people understand the truth of what’s happening in our country and beyond.
But: Were we biased? Yes. Almost inadvertently, I’d say. ABC News has the same problem so many leading cultural institutions do in America: A lack of viewpoint diversity.
When I joined ABC News in 1997, it was basically run by white men. (I have nothing against white men; I am one.) That management structure lasted for a long time, way too long. But over the last decade or so, the company made an effort to hire and promote journalists from a much wider diversity of backgrounds and life experiences. That changed ABC News, for the better: changed our conversations, changed our perceptions of stories and events in the country and around the world, changed our coverage. For me, the job got a lot more interesting, and more fun.
But there was one way ABC did not change and did not diversify. It is no secret. There are hardly any people who supported Donald Trump at ABC News—or the other corporate/legacy/mainstream news networks. And this is bound to impact coverage, not so much out of malevolent bias (that’s the cartoon version peddled by Trump, Brendan Carr and online MAGA), but more out of what is a kind of deafness. The old news divisions don’t hear many of the voices of the country, because those voices aren’t in the newsroom. Yes, news teams go out with a microphone and a camera and accost people at Trump rallies; but to me that often comes off as weirdly anthropological and inaccurate, kind of like trying to understand nature by visiting a zoo. You don’t really see a tiger at the zoo, just a version of a tiger.
Is it really inadvertent bias if the entire industry makes a constant effort to maintain it? I don’t think so. We live in a country that is roughly 50-50 in terms of who votes for which party. Obviously, Trump voters had an advantage in the most recent presidential election. There are lots of them out there in the world. And yet the number of Trump voters at ABC News could probably fit into a Volkswagen. That’s not inadvertent bias, that’s intentional.
The fact that it’s the same at all of the broadcast networks plus CNN, MSNBC and all of the major newspapers on both coasts sort of suggests this doesn’t just happen anymore than Fox News being more conservative just happens. There are choices involved and the media has been making the same choices for decades.
Whenever this problem is raised, usually by someone like Moran who is now outside the system, the response is that media types make an effort to be fair, regardless of their personal beliefs. And Moran does that too.
Now, this might sound strange coming from me. The manner of my…accelerated…departure from ABC News has earned me a reputation in many quarters as a raging, anti-Trump firebrand. So be it. I don’t take back or regret a syllable of the post I wrote about Stephen Miller and Donald Trump that got me fired by ABC. I think it was an accurate, fair, and true description of those men. But inside the newsroom, I had a reputation of trying to get colleagues to see the other side, to walk a mile in the shoes of MAGA, to acknowledge the democratic forces that have made Donald Trump the dominant political figure of our time.
So, yes, from my perspective, the old news networks are biased.
In Terry Moran’s mind, Terry Moran was fair to the right. And here’s the scary part: He may be telling the truth. Terry Moran who was fired for openly hating the people in the White House may actually be more fair than a lot of people still at ABC News. I don’t find that hard to believe because looking through the Hot Air archives I can see that Terry Moran had his moments when he did get it and had something positive to say about Trump and conservatives. This report wasn’t that long ago.
ABC’s @TerryMoran on the Gold Star families at #RNC2024: “David, I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything like that at a convention. The connection between this crowd and those family members of the fallen. It was just absolutely extraordinary. The emotions, the call and… pic.twitter.com/Nr8pTUT6mu
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 18, 2024
And that’s not the only time Moran seemed to be cutting against the left-wing media grain in his reporting on Trump. Remember this?
ABC’s Terry Moran, on the PA town hall that turned into an Evening with Donald Trump and some musical selections:
“Inside that hall … people were having a good time. What can I tell you? It did not seem out of the ordinary. It seemed almost intimate … [Trump] came down off… pic.twitter.com/EbKSToNOhH
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) October 15, 2024
The point is, Moran really did offer some fairness at times when other journalists were doing resistance journalism. He got fired for crashing out over Stephen Miller but I really do think there are probably many journalists still at ABC (and other networks) who are much worse.
This has been a lifelong fixation for many if not most conservatives. The first rule of being part of the media seems to be that you don’t talk about the bias inherent in the system. Only when your career is over can you venture to say what was obvious all along, i.e. the media is horribly biased against conservatives and that bias often warps the national conversation in ways that are deeply unfair to about half the country.
Update: To be clear, I’m not saying Terry Moran wasn’t biased only that I think he’s probably not the worst at ABC. But he was definitely biased left in a lot of his reporting as this clip suggests.
Good riddance! ABC News suspends Terry Moran after his disgusting comments about Stephen Miller.
Here’s a look back at Terry’s hatred for President Trump and his infatuation with Obama over the past 19 yearspic.twitter.com/WoZaoxrPeU
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) June 8, 2025
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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