The masks are coming off when it comes to (now-formerly) prominent members of our media.
Exhibit A is Terry Moran, the recently axed senior national correspondent for ABC News. Moran has always been a partisan and a petty one at that. But what he wrote regarding Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was as unhinged as your average Keith Olbermann or Lincoln Project post.
“It’s not brains. It’s bile. Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran wrote in the wee hours early Sunday morning. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. This is unhinged stuff written at a time when one can’t help but wonder what Moran’s lucidity was. The post instantly went viral before being deleted, but the damage was done. ABC announced on Sunday that Moran had been suspended.
At the time, I argued that he absolutely should be fired, and here’s why: This isn’t some MSNBC or CNN talking head paid to offer provocative opinions. This isn’t a left-wing blogger or podcaster tasked with doing the same. This was a senior national correspondent for a major news network. And ask yourself this: Could you ever imagine ABC journalistic heavyweights such as Ted Koppel, David Brinkley, or Peter Jennings writing such a screed?
That’s a rhetorical question.
After some deliberation, Moran was mercifully fired, with the network announcing they wouldn’t be renewing his contract. The next day, Moran popped up on Substack.
“For almost 28 years, I was a reporter and anchor for ABC News. As you may have heard, I am no longer there. I’m here with you, on Substack,” Moran said in a video posted on the site. “This [is an] amazing space and I can’t wait to get at it … get into the important work that we all have to do in this time of such trouble for our country.”
Of course, Moran provided no apology. And by the way, what “trouble for our country” is he talking about?
At last check, inflation continues to fall, currently sitting around 2%. Unemployment is so low that there are more job offerings than job seekers. Consumer confidence is at its highest level in four years. And illegal border crossings are down more than 95% since Trump took office. As for the president himself, he currently has a 53% approval rating in Rasmussen’s daily tracking.
But Moran is and has always been a hardcore Democrat.
Proof? Here’s what he had to say about Barack Obama after he was inaugurated in 2009:
“Barack Obama is the first President since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Office,” Moran swooned. “I mean, from visionary leader of a giant movement, now he’s got an executive position that he has to perform in, in a way.”
It’s amazing that going from community organizer to commander-in-chief can be considered a step down. But OK!
Compare that to his “reporting” on President Donald Trump by invoking Hitler in an attempt to make Trump Nazi adjacent.
“[America First] carries with it overtones from the 1930s when an antisemitic movement said, ‘We don’t want to get involved in Europe’s war. It’s the Jews’ fault in Germany!’ Charles Lindbergh led them. It is a term, as he defined it his way. Still, the words carry ugly echoes in our history,” explained a totally unbiased Moran in January 2017 following Trump’s first inauguration speech.
If ABC had any integrity, it would have at least reprimanded Moran for those previous two comments alone. But they only led to bigger contracts and promotions. This is no surprise, of course, considering the most senior “journalist” at the network is George Stephanopoulos, who served as Bill Clinton’s pit bull in shaming his female sexual misconduct accusers. Years later, while anchoring two programs at ABC, it was revealed that Stephanopoulos had donated large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation. There was no reprimand for doing so, with the network issuing a statement saying it would “stand behind him.”
But things really came to a head when Stephanopoulos, in a 2024 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), accused Trump of being “liable for rape” on multiple occasions, which was obviously not true. Trump sued ABC for defamation, and the network quickly settled for $15 million.
So with that backdrop, it begs the question: What the hell was Moran thinking when he decided to rant about one of the president’s top advisers in the most personal manner possible?
Now, Moran can be himself on social media without the confines of a contract. He follows in the footsteps of other so-called anchors and reporters in being free to take the mask off after decades of claiming they were just serious journalists asking serious questions without fear or favor to a party. This includes former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who defended Moran while also targeting Stephen Miller.
“For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose,” Miller wrote on X after reading Moran’s post. “Terry pulled off his mask.”
“Nothing lazier or more transparently dishonest than to take one person’s deleted tweet and try to apply the sentiment to an entire group of folks,” Todd retorted. Ask yourself why he wants to slime any journalist for the sins of one? It’s intentionally dishonest and intentionally divisive.”
This is the same Chuck Todd who once hilariously claimed there is no left-wing bias in the press.
“We shouldn’t have accepted the premise that there was liberal bias,” Todd said in 2021. “We ended up in this both sides trope. We bought into the idea that, oh my God, we’re perceived as having a liberal bias.”
Yeah, about that. A 2017 Harvard study found that during Trump’s first 100 days in office, NBC News, along with CNN, led the way in covering the Trump administration, with 93% of coverage being negative.
And who was the political director of NBC News at the time?
Chuck Todd, of course.
We also have Don Lemon and Jim Acosta of the aforementioned CNN, who wore thin on coworkers and viewers alike before being fired (Lemon) or demoted (Acosta was asked to do the graveyard shift before leaving). In Lemon’s case, he recently agreed with former CNN New Year’s Eve cohost Kathy Griffin that Republicans rigged the 2024 election.
“You’re not far off,” Lemon replied. “I mean, I won’t say that I disagree with you.”
Wow. When did election denialism become a good thing?
As for Acosta, he held an anti-Trump town hall in Washington. And at the end of the event featuring the president’s harshest critics, the former “senior White House correspondent” had the lights turned down and asked the audience to turn on their mobile flashlights.
“This is not a country that is being plunged into darkness. This is a country that can find its way back to the light. Keep watching us. We’re going to give you the truth,” Acosta said in what can only be described as patently cringeworthy, even for him.
But former CNN White House Correspondent John Harwood takes the cake. Here’s some of his greatest hits on X since becoming unemployed.
Bronze: “Tom Homan is like an early 20th-century Southern sheriff who’d send a mob to find a black kid who’d allegedly looked the wrong way at a white woman. The mob would bring back a kid who kinda/sorta fit the description, and the Homan character would say, ‘string him up!’”
Silver: “Unfortunate that someone so dishonest, so smarmy, of such low character as [JD Vance], is our vice president.”
Gold: “What the Republican Party has become: friend to angry white guys, authoritarian governments, rich people trying to avoid taxes, Nazi sympathizers, enemy of science, education, religious charity, affordable health care, rule of law, defense of democracy.”
This person actually once moderated a presidential debate on CNBC. True story.
Sometimes it’s not people who change, it’s the mask that falls off. Another mask came off this week, this time Terry Moran’s.
