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6 months after settling with Trump, ABC suspends journalist Terry Moran for late-night tweet
ABC senior correspondent Terry Moran has been suspended for a social-media post he made shortly after midnight on Sunday, calling President Donald Trump and his deputy chief of staff 'world class haters' who get 'spiritual nourishment' from hatred and personal glorification.
The original post has been taken down but screenshots of it are circulating and getting more oxygen from Trump supporters decrying media bias and Trump opponents saying that the message should be widely shared. Even Vice President JD Vance shared the post in its entirety on his X account.
Not surprisingly, ABC News has not shared the post on its X account, although there was plenty of runaway zebra news. Just six months ago, the network agreed to pay $16 million to settle Trump's defamation suit stemming from George Stephanopoulos wrongly saying that Trump had been found 'liable for rape.'
Writing for senior media writer Tom Jones said, 'Moran's late-night post will be a headache for ABC News. That pain will be felt by other media, too.'
It's being held up as another egregious example of media bias, another reason 'why you don't hate the media enough,' and it comes as another ABC reporter is being derided for coverage of protests in California over the weekend.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called Moran's post 'unhinged and unacceptable' and said Sunday morning that the White House had reached out to ABC 'to see how they plan to hold Terry accountable.'
A few hours later, the network issued this response, according to CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter: 'ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others. The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.'
Moran has not yet commented publicly on the matter. He had a sit-down interview with Trump in the Oval Office in April, an encounter described by Fox News as 'fiery.'
During that interview, which marked the first 100 days of his second presidency, Trump told Moran: 'They're giving you the big break of a lifetime. You're doing the interview, I picked you because, frankly, I never heard of you, but that's OK. I picked you, Terry, but you're not being very nice.'
The president also described ABC as 'fake news' and told Moran that he didn't trust him. Neither man seemed enamored of the other during the interview, and Moran has made other posts critical of Trump in recent months.
But he also said last month on X that a comment Trump made on a trip to the Middle East was 'a very wise thing for an American president to say.'
Moran, 65, is a veteran journalist who also conducted sit-down interviews with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during their presidencies. He has been with ABC since 1997 and has been both co-anchor of 'Nightline' and ABC's chief White House correspondent.
In a recent poll by YouGov about which media sources Americans trust the most, ABC was last among the legacy networks, trailing PBS, NBC and CBS.
