You will not be surprised to learn that the Media Research Center had even more to say about Terry Moran losing his job at ABC for expressing an opinion. Alex Christy claimed to be offended in a June 14 post that someone came to Moran’s defense:
Earlier this week, ABC News canned senior national correspondent Terry Moran for posting on social media that White House domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller is “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,” a “world-class hater,” and “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” This did not sit well with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, who claimed on Wednesday’s The Weekly Show podcast that ABC is “a fucking joke” for firing Moran.
Towards the end of the show, Stewart turned to audience-submitted questions as producer Brittany Mehmedovic asked him, “Do you think ABC should’ve fired Terry Moran over his Stephen Miller tweet?”
An angry Stewart replied, “Of course not, so stupid. No, for God’s sakes. Should they have fired him? Shouldn’t have paid the $50 million, they shouldn’t have fired him. They’re literally—every day on Fox News, they’re taking stuff out of context, or their people are saying utterly vicious things about Democratic politicians and all kinds of other things. The entire thing is because ABC clings to this façade that they somehow exist in a bubble outside of all of this. It’s a joke. They’re a fucking joke, and—”
Moran was somebody that ABC insisted (despite all evidence to the contrary) was a straight newsman, so comparing him to certain nameless opinion people at Fox is not a good analogy. Jimmy Kimmel and The View say vicious things about conservatives and Republicans every day, and ABC does nothing about it because those shows have long since stopped pretending to be neutral messengers of the news.
Yet we’ve never seen Christy demand that Fox News be a neutral messenger of the news, which makes his complaint about ABC rather hypocritical. Notably, he didn’t object when Stewart called Fox News “a 24-hour Trump ball polishing machine.”
Tim Graham spent a June 17 post complaining that Moran defended himself:
Terry Moran granted his first interview after being dismissed by ABC News to The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller, which is like going to MSNBC to vent your anti-Trump feelings. Unsurprisingly, Moran doubled down on his Twitter tirade over Trump and his top adviser Stephen Miller being “world-class haters,” and Miller “eats his hate” and finds “spiritual nourishment” from his hate. Moran insisted this wasn’t a “drunk tweet,” but that it was The Truth.
Moran weirdly claimed “I’m a member of the most despised tribe in America. I’m a proud centrist.” No one’s really a “centrist” when it comes to Trump, but Moran is claiming that he’s for “decency” and “tolerance.” Then he brought up a role model.
“I guess I’m a Hubert Humphrey Democrat,” he said, “I’m old enough to remember him. And you know, get practical things done that people need in a decent way, and stand up for what’s right.” Humphrey was a liberal Democrat pushing LBJ’s massive “Great Society,” not a centrist. It’s like saying I’m a centrist who’s a Ted Kennedy Democrat or a Jimmy Carter Democrat. But he suggested that because Miller “degrades” the civil discourse, he’s “dangerous.”
[…]He claimed his Trump interview was an example (Trump disagreed, in real time). And his midnight tweet? “I would also say this, while very hot, is an observation, a description that is accurate and true”[.]
Graham didn’t dispute the accuracy of Moran’s observation — and, like Christy, will never hold anyone at Fox News to the same standards he demands of Moran.
Nicholas Fondacaro added his own hypocritical whining to the conversation in a June 19 post:
ABC News did the right thing in firing long-time correspondent Terry Moran after it became painfully apparent to executives that he was far too comfortable with publicly flaunting his left-wing hate while enveloped in the protection of the network’s banner. This standard needs to be applied to the other festering problem for the ABC News brand: The View.
The legacy product of storied ABC reporter Barbara Walters, meant to feature smart discussion from accomplished women with different points of view, has become a laughing stock of uninformed political hot takes and a megaphone for some the worst of partisan venom coursing through America’s body politic.
Like his co-workers, Fondacaro would never demand that Fox News be held to the same standard he demands of ABC News. And the MRC is never going to note that Moran was arguably vindicated a few weeks later, when a video resurfaced of a young Stephen Miller endorsing torture as “a celebration of life and human dignity” — indeed, the MRC has not mentioned this video at all.