The Firing of ABC’s Terry Moran is a Grim Victory For The Woke Right

Update: ABC News announced Tuesday it will not renew senior national correspondent Terry Moran’s contract over his now-deleted tweet criticizing Stephen Miller.

Terry Moran made a mistake.

Not a big, career-killing one —more like the kind of late-night lapse that happens when the filter slips and the truth comes out a little too unvarnished. In the bleary hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the ABC News senior correspondent let fly a tweet about Stephen Miller, calling him “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,” and saying his “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.”

The blunt bit of analysis was deleted quickly. The damage was already done, his post having landed squarely in the middle of the culture war mosh pit, where such commentary is chum for partisan sharks desperate for engagement. And what rates better on Elon Musk’s X than “traditional media” stars showcasing bias?

ABC suspended Moran — pending an internal review, of course — and the online outrage machine whirred into action. Cue days upon days of pearl-clutching from the pro-Trump media ecosystem that once claimed to stand in opposition to cancel culture. Suddenly, and laughably, figures like Megyn Kelly were furiously demanding that Moran be fired for a single tweet.

Kelly — whose entire post-television career is founded upon the premise that she utters the unsayable — demanding a journalist be punished for criticizing a presidential administration is of course laughable (this is the woman who just last year said of Joe Biden: “Fuck you, Joe Biden”). But it should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the regular hypocrisies of independent personalities who hold their legacy media counterparts to a standard they have never adhered to themselves.

Stephen Miller no doubt considers this whole affair a net win. He thrives on being able to cast the media as the enemy of his bold ideas. His fuel is liberal outrage, and now he’s got a tanker truck’s worth (Uh oh — please don’t try to get me fired for this analysis, Megyn).

Yet the issue here isn’t whether Miller deserved the invective, nor whether Moran’s analysis was accurate, as many defending him claim it to be. It is whether a senior correspondent at a network like ABC News should be engaging in the kind of unvarnished hot take Moran posted to his Twitter feed. Certainly, the language in the post was emotionally charged and crossed a line into the sort of floral language news correspondents should avoid.

ABC’s suspension isn’t surprising. Its news division is still clinging to the tattered flag of objectivity, trying to draw lines in an industry where the chalk keeps getting washed away. But what is surprising — if you’re still capable of surprise in this media environment — is how selectively the outrage lands.

Moran got slapped down for violating journalistic standards of objectivity. Fair enough. There are journalists out there with thoughtful criticisms of his post who maintain good reputations for honesty themselves.

But the most vocal critics of his tweet are people who have zero standards. They’re not journalists. They’re avatars, brands, outrage entrepreneurs. Their stock-in-trade is pumping out commentary far more unhinged than what Moran said, without ever risking suspension because no one can suspend you when you’re your own boss.

Megyn Kelly, for example, once claimed — baselessly — that Kamala Harris “slept her way into politics.” That wasn’t a slip. That was a smear. Did anyone call for her firing? No. She’s untethered from the rules that govern institutions like ABC. There are countless examples that more accurately portray her nasty invective, but it suffices to say that she plays by a different set of guidelines: clicks, attention, monetization.

And then there’s Stephen Miller, a taxpayer-funded hatchet man who’s left a long digital trail of bile. Just a sample: CNN’s Jim Acosta? “Outrageous, ignorant, foolish.” Aaron Rupar? “Vile and despicable liar.” Axios’s Jim VandeHei? “Hateful propaganda liar.” Elie Mystal? “Utterly repugnant… shameful.” And so on. No HR investigations. No press statements. No timeouts. Because again, he’s not a journalist. He’s a power player in a game where cruelty is the currency.

This asymmetry is the core of the problem. Journalists are held to impossibly high standards of accountability, while the real drivers of disinformation and public rage skate by unchecked. The more “independent” the media becomes — be it YouTube screamers, Substack polemicists, or social-media flamethrowers — the more neutered traditional journalism looks by comparison. And the more the public, understandably, tunes out.

We live in a time when ratings reward rage, and legacy outlets are increasingly viewed as both compromised and toothless. The people still trying to tell the truth are left hemmed in by rules that were written for another era, on another platform, for another kind of audience.

We should be asking harder questions—not just about Moran’s tweet, but about the environment that made it feel necessary. About how we’ve created a system where the loudest voices are rewarded not for their accuracy, but for their ability to provoke. About why we hold journalists to impossible standards while letting others burn the entire ecosystem down without consequence.

This moment — this small scandal with big implications — could be a clarifying one. Terry Moran is no hack. He’s a smart, seasoned reporter who made a bad call. He’s also, and this might come as a surprise to his critics, not a liberal in the slightest. But maybe, just maybe, he can use this moment to start a much bigger conversation about the asymmetry of outrage, and how the Fourth Estate is being slowly strangled by a combination of bad faith, broken incentives, and rules that no longer apply.

Lord knows, we need someone to have that conversation. And Moran, by virtue of his stumble, might be just the right person to do it, That’s never going to happen, of course. So instead, Moran should address his mistake, apologize for the description of Miller, and ABC News should lift his suspension.

Meanwhile, reports of journalism being on life support might be more prescient than we ever believed possible, just for more complicated reasons than we previously thought.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.