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ABC News has suspended its senior national correspondent after he described top White House aide Stephen Miller as “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” on social media.
In a now deleted post, Terry Moran, who recently conducted an interview with Donald Trump, said that the president and his deputy chief of staff, Miller, were both “world-class” haters.
An ABC News spokesperson said that Moran “has been suspended pending further evaluation”, adding: “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others. The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.”
According to a screenshot of the post, Moran said that Miller was not the brains behind Trumpism and his ability to translate the movement’s “impulses” into policy was “not brains. It’s bile.”
“You can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran added. “He eats his hate.”
He added of Trump: “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.”
Miller shot back, saying: “The most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described Moran’s rhetoric as “unacceptable and unhinged” on Fox News. “I think this speaks to the distrust that the American public have in the legacy media,” she added. JD Vance, the vice-president, described Moran’s post as a “vile smear”.
ABC News’ suspension of Moran comes nearly six months after the organisation agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum after he filed a defamation case following anchor George Stephanopoulos repeating an assertion on ABC’s This Week that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit filed by the columnist E Jean Carroll. He had not.
The latest incident will probably deepen suspicion on the right that US mainstream media outlets are fundamentally biased against the administration.
In its statement, ABC News maintained a position of neutrality, saying: “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others.”
