Terry Moran’s only mistake was speaking honestly at a time when loyalty to the presidency supersedes journalistic integrity.
ABC News suspended journalist Terry Moran over a social media post calling President Donald Trump and his policy strategist Stephen Miller “world-class haters.”
(Lorenzo Bevilaqua / ABC via Getty Images)
If, as the old Beltway saw has it, a gaffe is when politicians say what they really think, the journalistic corollary in the Trump era is that saying the obvious is a fireable offense. That’s the chief takeaway from the ritual sacrifice of longtime ABC News national correspondent Terry Moran for a late-night social post about the leading White House merchants of hate.
The fateful post went live on June 8, and Moran deleted it not long afterward. Yet its brief half-life on X was enough to stoke days of performative rage on the MAGA right. The White House press secretary weighed in with an X post deriding Moran as a “so-called ‘journalist,’” describing his comments as “unhinged and unacceptable,” and demanding disciplinary action from ABC. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the main subject of Moran’s post, followed up with a post of his own denouncing Moran’s “public meltdown” while recurring to the MAGA media-baiting playbook with this snake-in-the-grass refrain: “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.” JD Vance, ever keen to purge public discourse of any residual memory of his own tour of duty as a paid Never Trumper commentator on CNN, called out Moran’s comments as a “vile smear” and demanded that the network give Miller a personal apology.
So what, exactly, was the nature of Moran’s thoughtcrime?
“The thing about Stephen Miller,” Moran wrote, “is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism.” He then went on to explain:
Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy. But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller. 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. You can see that just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate. Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred is only a means to an end and that end his [sic] his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.
As they say on social media, spot the lie.
Moran’s miniature character study was noteworthy for its genuine insight; Miller’s rage against immigrants, trans people, and his political opponents does have a clear devotional quality. The conviction that Miller speaks for and defends a perennially embattled “real America”—besieged by non-white opportunists and criminal types—was imprinted on him from childhood, when he broke off friendships on grounds of Latino descent. In high school and college, he would throw trash on the floor and loudly demand that the janitorial staff pick up after him. As Nation columnist David Klion writes, “there was something fundamentally malevolent about Miller from the start.”
That something went on to define Miller’s political career, as a staffer for hard-right Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, and then as an early and influential recruit to Trump’s first presidential run. As Miller was presiding over Trump’s first Muslim travel ban and the administration’s brutal family-separation policy, he sent a stream of emails to Breitbart News that teemed with links to white nationalist agitprop on far-right sites such as VDare and American Renaissance, while also lauding The Camp of the Saints, a racist work of fiction that’s a foundational text for adherents of the “Great Replacement” theory, according to a 2019 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In any robust and democratically minded mediasphere, in other words, the designation of Miller as an impassioned “world-class hater” wouldn’t be remotely controversial—indeed, the real failing of our national political press is how slavishly it bows and scrapes before this heinous figure on no other grounds than his job title. For an illustration of how the media should treat a bad-faith bigot and liar like Miller, it’s necessary to look to the foreign press—notably, Chilean reporter José María del Pino calmly challenging Miller’s bogus talking points about Venezuelan migration as the hatemonger melts down into an incoherent tirade.
Yet as they also say on social media, here we are: a veteran news anchor is deemed unprofessional and worse for speaking the simple, abundantly documented truth. In a predictably content-challenged statement on ABC’s decision not to renew Moran’s contract, a network spokesperson burbled that “we hold all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism, and we remain committed to delivering straightforward, trusted journalism.”
No you don’t, actually.
ABC already offered a bracing demonstration of its lapsed standards of journalistic professionalism by electing to settle a Trump lawsuit over entirely justifiable comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos on E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil lawsuit against Trump for sexual assault. That $15 million payoff—laughably dressed up as a donation to the Trump presidential library—was an early signal from the corporate media establishment that it would go all out in deferring to the preferred policy initiatives and persecution narratives of the MAGA movement. Another dismal sign of such capitulation was the prominent donations of Big Tech moguls to Trump’s bloated $240 million inauguration fund, as well as the recent resignations of Bill Owens, the chief producer at 60 Minutes, and Wendy McMahon, the chief of CBS News, over what are clearly more acts of MAGA obeisance in advance of CBS’s planned merger with Paramount.
All of this corporate fawning over the Trump White House has underlined a long-standing through line in authoritarian rule: The first, and most influential, class of quislings is the business establishment. That’s the key point to bear in mind as the mainstream press clings to its outmoded image as bold truth-tellers to power. In a grim exercise in self-fabulizing, CNN aired a Broadway performance of Good Night, and Good Luck—George Clooney’s paean to Edward R. Murrow’s fourth-estate crusade against the vicious demagogy of Joe McCarthy—at the very moment all network and cable networks were platforming the Trump administration’s vicious lies about the immigration protests in Los Angeles. To further compound the gruesome irony here, CNN anchor Jake Tapper adjourned to his X account the next day to recirculate posts deriding Democratic support for the LA protests.
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The fascist crackdown in LA, as it happens, was entirely engineered by the hateful bloodlust of Stephen Miller, as The Wall Street Journal has reported in detail. And as Democratic leaders in California like Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass have resisted the federal invasion there, Miller has been all over social media, promoting hate-fueled talking points that have proved Terry Moran right, over and over again.
“America was invaded by illegal aliens,” Miller posted on X Tuesday in a mash-up of Camp of the Saints and Project 2025. “Americans voted to end the invasion. Democrat rioters are now waging violent insurrection to overturn the election result and continue the invasion.” The day before, he plumped the same white nationalist fable, in a shriller apocalyptic register: “Los Angeles is all the proof you need that mass immigration unravels societies. You can have all the other plans and budgets you want. If you don’t fix migration, then nothing else can be fixed—or saved.”
These are, of course, all lies. Neither LA nor California is unraveling, and immigration in the state has actually been trending downward. Unemployment is likewise at the national average. The only recent LA-based social upheaval of note has been the flurry of unprovoked ICE raids that came just ahead of the similarly unprovoked show of force at the Paramount Home Depot parking lot, all straight from the Stephen Miller playbook. Here’s the Los Angeles Times’ wrapup of that thuggish offensive:
The day before [the Paramount raid], federal officials raided a retail and distribution warehouse in the Fashion District downtown, a business district fueled by immigrants, and arrested a top union official. Leading up to the workplace raid, federal agents arrested immigrants as they came to scheduled check-ins or made courthouse appearances up and down the state, tearing apart families. One father was arrested in front of his 8-year old-son. Parent groups raised alarms after a Torrance elementary student and his father were set for deportation. For many, talk about deporting violent criminals didn’t ring true. “This whole rhetoric of coming after hardworking families is what we are all concerned about,” Solache said. “When you come to do raids at businesses, that is where the anger comes from.”
This is all indispensable background to the authoritarian civil-war-in-the-making in Los Angeles. And one clear lesson of the Terry Moran debacle is that you won’t be seeing it on ABC News anytime soon.
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