Six days after ABC News confirmed that Terry Moran‘s contract would not be renewed due to a post he made on X about Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, the journalist is standing by what he wrote.
“You don’t sacrifice your citizenship as a journalist, and your job is not to be objective,” Moran told Tim Miller for Bulwark. “There is no Mount Olympus of objectivity where a Mandarin class of wise people have no feelings about their society. We’re all in this together. What you have to be is fair and accurate, and I would refer to the interview with the president that I did, or a lot of my work. And I would also say that this, while very hot, is an observation, a description that was accurate and true.”
The tweet in question was posted on X during the early hours of June 8 and subsequently deleted. Later that morning, ABC News suspended Moran.
“The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism,” Moran wrote in his tweet, referring to the president’s Chief of Staff. “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 this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
He then went on to also call Trump a “world-class hater,” adding, “But his hatred is only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”
Two days later, ABC news confirmed that Moran was being axed from the network, where he’d been working since 1997. “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 network said. “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.”
Moran now admits that he “became bad business” for ABC News, but stood by what he said and refused to apologize. He also pointed out that the post was mostly directed at Miller, not Trump, but said he used “very strong language deliberately.”
“You see him all the time, spitting venom and lies, degrading our public discourse, debasing it, and using the power of the White House and what he’s been given to grind us down. That is very disturbing to me,” Moran added.