The World Class Cowards of ABC News
In an official statement on Tuesday, ABC News announced that it would not renew the contract of correspondent and anchor Terry Moran.
"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 statement read. "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.”
That statement is such a sublime example of comedy writing, it made me want to say, “Stay in your lane, ABC News!”
Instead, I’d like to ask two questions about ABC’s beef with Moran.
First question: Was what he posted on social media—that Donald J. Trump and Stephen Miller are world class haters—really just his opinion, or verifiable fact?
In my view, Moran was just recognizing these two gentlemen for excelling in their chosen field.
It would be impossible to list all the times Trump and Miller have brought home the gold in the hating Olympics, but let me give a couple of examples.
On the campaign trail last year in Wisconsin, Trump said, “These migrants, they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat... I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members.”
Sounds pretty hate-y to me.
As for Miller, his long career in hatred is well documented in the 2020 book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by reporter Jean Guerrero, who probably won’t be working at ABC News any time soon.
In an appearance on the “PBS NewsHour” on November 14, 2019, Guerrero revealed that Miller was a big fan of The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel about immigrants destroying Western Civilization. This top pick for the Stephen Miller Book Club describes migrants as "kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms, all the teeming ants toiling for the white man's comfort."
So, yes, when Terry Moran called Trump and Miller world class haters, he was stating fact, not opinion. If he can be criticized for anything, it’s that as a newsman, he was reporting something that wasn’t exactly news.
But let’s move on to my second question: What other journalists in broadcast history would have been canned for violating ABC’s “highest standards of objectivity”?
Well, Walter Cronkite, for one.
On February 27, 1968, after a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, Cronkite famously said this on his evening news program, which had an audience of 30 million Americans: “The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion.”
Pack up your office, Walter!
Terry Moran’s non-renewal has less to do with ABC’s pompously-stated policy than with parent company Disney’s sweaty campaign to appease the fascistic Trump regime. This is the same company, after all, who shoveled $15 million into his trough last year to settle a baseless defamation suit.
The ongoing capitulation of media corporations undermines the First Amendment, enables authoritarianism, and should alarm anyone who cares about democracy.
At the risk of violating the highest standards of objectivity, let me say this: I am more grateful than ever that I don’t work for corporate media. I work for you.
Let's show up in such huge numbers for Saturday's protests that the corporate media will have no choice but to cover them.
As long as they don’t fabricate stories about our “violence”