The Media Research Center is not a fan of Terry Moran. When President Trump did an interview with Moran to crow about his first 100 days in office in April, Geoffrey Dickens previewed it with a compilation post asserting that it would be a “hostile interview” and repeating what were purported to be Moran’s “most obnoxious takes”; afterward, Jorge Bonilla was mad that Moran pointed out Trump’s false claims about wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. So when Moran got caught expressing an unapproved opinion, Tim Graham was quick to pounce (in a Trump Regime Media way, of course) in a June 8 post:
ABC News has suspended senior national correspondent Terry Moran after he tweeted shortly after midnight as the cable news channels were assessing peaceful and violent protests against ICE immigration enforcement efforts in Los Angeles. President Trump and his domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller were slammed as “world-class” haters.
“The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism. 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,” Moran argued on X early Sunday.
“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,” the ABC News reporter added. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
As for the president, “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.”
Moran later deleted the tweet, but not before it was widely shared and rebuked. Team Trump returned rhetorical fire. On Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Maria Bartiromo: “Hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated.”
Graham dutifully devoted his podcast the next day to complaining about Moran:
ABC reporter Terry Moran was suspended on Sunday for a rage-filled tweet about President Trump and Stephen Miller being “world-class haters.” This followed liberal rage over Trump ordering the California National Guard to restore order over immigration protests in Los Angeles.
He deleted his angry tweet, but not before it was shared all over the internet. Is Miller the “brains behind Trumpism?
Graham did not dispute the accuracy of Moran’s claims, and we cannot recall Graham ever criticizing anyone on Fox News for expressing an opinion. Dan Gainor, the former MRC apparatchik who left the organization under suspiciously quiet circumstances, expressed his own Moran-bashing in an “opinion” article at Fox News.
When ABC fired Moran for his tweet, the MRC couldn’t have been happier. Curtis Houck did the happy dance in a June 10 post:
In a statement by ABC News’s public relations department and shared with CNN’s Brian Stelter, the Disney-owned liberal network revealed Tuesday they fired longtime correspondent Terry Moran, less than a week after having been suspended for a late-night tweet smearing longtime Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller as “a world-class hater” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.”
[…]While Moran’s axing is something few could have expected if this had occurred, say, eight years ago, it does nothing to change their reputation of weapons-grade liberal bias.
In the time since Moran’s suspension Sunday morning, ABC’s liberal bias hasn’t relented one bit, most notably blaming President Trump for the Los Angeles riots.
Houck didn’t explain why that assessment was inaccurate or “liberal bias.” Instead, he whined that someone came to Moran’s defense:
Someone should check on Mediaite’s Colby Hall, who kvetched about Moran’s tweet “having landed squarely in the middle of the culture war mosh pit, where such commentary is chum for partisan sharks desperate for engagement.”
Hall further complained ABC’s move to suspend him was a sign they’re “still clinging to the tattered flag of objectivity, trying to draw lines in an industry where the chalk keeps getting washed away” and “violating journalistic standards of objectivity” while those most outraged “have zero standards” and are “not journalists.”
Thus, in his world and those of media elites, only those whom are defined as card-carrying journalists or members of this or that club determine what is and is not a faux pas.
Houck didn’t explain how he, as a right-wing media elitist and partisan shark, was better qualified to make that determination than Hall.
Graham similarly cheered Moran’s firing in his June 11 podcast: “Even the George Stephanopoulos Network thought that was too much opinion.” This from the organization that didn’t think Brent Bozell smearing President Obama as a “skinny ghetto crackhead” was “too much opinion.”