Politics
JUST IN: ABC News Fires Senior Reporter Over Anti-Trump Bias
ABC News has fired Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran just days after a lengthy tirade in which he described White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as being “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” in a since-deleted X post.
Moran’s post was made in reference to President Trump’s decision to deploy 2,000 California National Guard troops for 60 days in order to combat two days of violent rioting targeting federal immigration agents in Los Angeles. Miller had described the disturbances — which resulted in numerous injuries to ICE agents — as a violent “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.”
Moran, who landed an interview with President Trump back in April, referred to Miller as “one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy,” adding, “It’s not brains. It’s bile.”
“He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate,” the ABC correspondent ranted in the now-deleted post. “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end his his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”
A few hours after the post was made, an ABC News spokesperson stated that Moran had been suspended while a formal review was conducted.
“We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran and based on his recent post – which was a clear violation of ABC News policies – we have made the decision to not renew,” the outlet announced Tuesday. “At ABC News, we hold all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism, and we remain committed to delivering straightforward, trusted journalism,” a network spokesperson added.
Moran, 65, was a senior national correspondent at the network. He previously served as ABC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent from 2013 to 2018.
Prior to that, Moran co-anchored the network’s newsmagazine Nightline for eight years, and had a stint as ABC’s chief White House correspondent from 1999 to 2005.
Moran’s firing comes on the heels of a $15 million defamation settlement ABC News reached with President Trump in December. The settlement came after network mainstay George Stephanopoulos’ use of the word “rape” to describe the highly controversial defamation and sexual abuse case brought by E. Jean Carroll.
