Terry Moran Says He Doesn’t Regret Posts Criticizing Trump Administration

Media|What Was Terry Moran Thinking?

Terry Moran wasted no time ending the speculation.

“It wasn’t a drunk tweet,” he said, flashing a lopsided grin on Sunday as he chatted on Zoom.

Mr. Moran, a longtime ABC News correspondent, was ousted from his network last week over a post on X that castigated the Trump administration in searing, personal terms. In his first interview since then, he offered no apologies. He sounded chipper — at least, as chipper as a journalist could be after losing a job in spectacularly public fashion.

Recounting how he came to write his fateful post, Mr. Moran, 65, said it was “a normal family night” that began with a meditative walk with his dog in the woods: “I was thinking about our country, and what’s happening, and just turning it over in my mind.” He returned home for family dinner and a movie, “Ocean’s Eleven.” He and his wife put their children to bed.

And then: “I wrote it, and I said, ‘That’s true.’”

“That” was a provocative post, published after midnight on June 8, tearing into Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, as “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred.” Mr. Moran wrote that Mr. Miller “eats his hate” as “spiritual nourishment” and assigned the term “world-class hater” to both Mr. Miller and President Trump, whom the correspondent had interviewed in the Oval Office weeks earlier.

The since-deleted post stunned Mr. Moran’s colleagues and prompted a furious riposte from Vice President JD Vance, who labeled it an “absolutely vile smear” and demanded an apology from ABC. Two days later, the network said it would not renew Mr. Moran’s contract, citing “a clear violation of ABC News policies.”

Some veteran journalists said that his comments crossed the line of impartiality, and provided a gift to right-wing politicians seeking to depict the mainstream media as biased against Mr. Trump. Supporters on the left cheered Mr. Moran for issuing what they considered a candid assessment.