Fired ABC Journalist Has Surprising Epiphany About Media Bias

Former ABC News Senior Correspondent Terry Moran admitted in a July 29 Substack post that his previous employer is “almost inadvertently” a biased organization.

ABC News fired Moran in June over his tirade against White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, whom he accused of being a “world-class hater” in a now-deleted X post. Moran wrote on his personal Substack that ABC News has fallen into the trap of lacking “viewpoint diversity,” particularly when it came to Trump.

“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,” Moran wrote.

Moran said that while ABC News made an effort to hire people from various backgrounds, there were hardly any staffers who supported Trump or understood his base. The lack of Trump supporters at ABC News inevitably caused “weirdly anthropological and inaccurate” reporting from ABC journalists who covered Trump or attended his rallies, Moran added.

“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,” Moran said.

“The old news divisions don’t hear many of the voices of the country, because those voices aren’t in the newsroom,” Moran continued. “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.”

Moran, who interviewed Trump from the Oval Office in April, accused Miller in June of being “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,” that his “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment” and that he “eats his hate.” He also accused Trump of being a “world-class hater” in the same X post.

Miller responded that Moran and others in the corporate press are “radicals adopting a journalist’s post.”

“The most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America,” Miller said in an X post from June 8. “For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”

Moran then stated that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr can “go to hell” over his appointment of a “bias monitor” to oversee coverage at CBS News. This condition stemmed from the Trump administration’s approval of a $8 billion sale of Paramount, CBS’ parent company, to SkyDance Media.

“The CEOs always think they can somehow pacify Trump or buy him off with concessions. And they are always wrong. Does this sound like a man who’s done trying to muscle the media into MAGA messaging?” Moran wrote.

During his April interview with Trump, Moran challenged Trump to order El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to return alleged MS-13 member Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador deported by the Trump administration in March. The administration acknowledged that Garcia’s deportation was a clerical error but held firm that he should have been removed from the U.S., particularly due to his alleged criminal gang association.

ABC News paid $15 million to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network in December after “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed in March 2024 that the then-president-elect was found liable of rape. CBS News and Paramount agreed to pay $36 million in total to settle a separate lawsuit brought against Trump, which alleged that the network deceptively edited a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris to bolster her chances in the 2024 election.