(Dobbs) ABC's Terry Moran: "He's A World-Class Hater"

If only Donald Trump and Stephen Miller could be suspended or terminated for their unhinged, unacceptable, vile words, it would be a fairer fight.

Terry Moran, ABC News’s senior national correspondent, never should have posted what he did.

The night before last, Moran wrote on X about Stephen Miller, President Trump’s most heartless hatchet man— and with the stiff competition out there, that’s saying something. “It’s not brains, it’s bile,” Moran said of Trump’s deputy chief of staff. “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.”

And on Donald Trump himself? He is “a world-class hater. But his hatred (sic) only a means to an end, and that end his his (sic) own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”

Moran shouldn’t have put that up on X. Not because he got it wrong. He didn’t. Trump and Miller are avatars of hate. Moran called it what it is. In a way, he was doing what he ought to. He was reporting what he knew about the man on the throne and the man right behind him. It was his way of holding these two vile men accountable. That is part of a journalist’s job.

And not because it might cost him his high perch at an American television network. Right now, ABC News says that Terry Moran— an almost 30 year veteran, a longtime A-lister at the network— has been “suspended.” Whether ultimately he stays or goes might depend on just how cowed ABC is by this vengeful White House.

But no, the reason Moran shouldn’t have posted what he did is that it flew in the face of what conscientious news journalists are supposed to practice: some call it objectivity, some call it neutrality, some just call it keeping your personal opinions out of your professional work. Terry Moran knows that— he has won an Emmy and a Peabody and some of the most cherished awards in journalism. Who knows what pushed him to the edge, but when he called Donald Trump and Stephen Miller “world-class haters,” he crossed a line he should not have crossed.

It’s not that journalists don’t have personal opinions. All of us do. We’d be no more than automatons if we didn’t. In fact it’s probably fair to say that journalists have stronger personal opinions than most people about the machinations of our world because we have a front row seat. Especially a reporter like Terry Moran. Just two months ago, he interviewed President Trump in the Oval Office.

But at the same time, our front row seat is a privilege. To earn it, to keep it, when we’re on the news side of the business (versus the opinion side), we should maintain a public stance of giving an airing to every newsmaker’s point of view, not to our point of view, even if privately we find some of them abhorrent. I was on the news side for the better part of my career, and I interviewed convicted murderers on death row in Texas, American Nazis in Idaho, terrorists in the Middle East. These people disgusted me, but my job was to report what they had to say, not what I had to say about them.

That’s the line that Terry Moran crossed.

Personally, now that I’m on the opinion side of the business, I feel like a tiger set free from its cage. In that quarter-century that I worked for ABC (followed by another decade with another network), my contract forbid me from endorsing a candidate for dog catcher, let alone for higher offices. Being free to speak out about the world’s machinations was liberating. It was a new kind of privilege.

What upsets me about Moran’s outburst, however much I agree with what he said, is that he reinforced the belief that so many Americans have that journalists aren’t giving us straight news anymore (and plenty would add, “if they ever did.”).

Now they can consider Moran’s post as proof. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “unhinged and unacceptable.” Vice President JD Vance called it an “absolutely vile smear, dripping with hatred.” He said Americans should remember this episode “every time you watch ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration.”

Of course, yet again, this is the White House talking out of both sides of its mouth.

Unhinged and unacceptable? A vile smear? Do they mean like when Trump talked about Liz Cheney during the campaign last year: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?” Or when he said at a Las Vegas rally during his first campaign, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay? Just knock the hell…. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”

Or like his statement last year that was worthy of Adolf Hitler: “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Remember how Trump ended that one? “Our threat is from within.” As for Stephen Miller, who has proclaimed that blacks are predisposed to commit more violent crimes, his view on immigrants is, “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

I don’t condone what Terry Moran did, but when it comes to vile, when it comes to unhinged and unacceptable, he has some competition.

Miller went on X after Moran’s written attack and said, “Terry pulled off his mask.” Yes he did. And whether suspended or terminated, he is paying the price.

If only Donald Trump and Stephen Miller could be suspended or terminated for their unhinged, unacceptable, vile words, it would be a fairer fight.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net