Terry Moran, senior national correspondent for ABC News, will not return to his position there after he referred to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as a “world-class hater.”
“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,” a spokesperson for ABC News said in a statement to HuffPost on Tuesday. “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.”
News of the ouster comes after ABC News suspended Moran, who has been with the news network since 2018, on Sunday after he wrote on social media that Miller and President Donald Trump are both a “world-class hater.”
“The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism,” Moran wrote early Sunday morning in the since-deleted post. “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 his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate. Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end his his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”
After Moran’s post, several top White House officials called for ABC News to do something, including Vice President JD Vance, who called Moran’s post an “absolutely vile smear” of Miller. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News that the White House reached out to ABC News regarding Moran’s post, adding that ABC News would “have to answer” for it.
Moran has yet to make a statement.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, wrote on social media “Talk shit, get hit” in response to the news of Moran not returning to ABC News.
This isn’t the first time ABC News has seemingly caved to the administration’s demands. In December, the news network agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos’ after he inaccurately said on-air assertion that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse.