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Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran worried Tuesday that the U.S. will soon lose its free press if President Donald Trump is not “stopped.”
Moran, who was fired in June from the network where he worked for almost 28 years after posting a scathing social media rant against Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller, discussed the state of the media with former MSNBC host Chris Matthews on Substack.
Lamenting the recent CBS/Paramount settlement with Trump, and other media shakeups, Matthews worried about the implications of media outlets caving to the president’s demands.
“Is this going to keep going?” Matthews asked. “Or is he going to keep going from network to network, to newspaper to newspaper?… Are they willing to be what they’ve been or are they just going to keep groveling?”
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Moran made a bold prediction that there will be no independent news in the U.S. because media organizations will have their power stripped from them by the current administration.
“I think they’re going to, at some point, get rid of the news divisions, is my prediction,” he told Matthews. “It will either be stripped from them—look, unless Trump is stopped, there’s a playbook here. You see it in all the authoritarian countries.”
“[Viktor] Orban did it, [Vladimir] Putin did it in Russia and the Law and Justice Party in Poland — they stripped the media, the news operations away from independent corporations that will stand up and they sell them to their cronies,” he continued.
Moran then brought up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigating ABC News over debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis’s fact-checking of Trump during the 2024 presidential debate that he said favored his opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Muir did nothing wrong, but because, you know, the law that governs these news operations and networks is that they have to operate in the public interest as defined by the Trump administration,” he warned. “At some point, they will find a reason to strip the ownership of these things from the corporations that now own them and sell them to their cronies, unless someone stops them.”
The White House did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Shortly after leaving ABC, Moran said that it was not a journalist’s job to be “objective.”
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“My own feeling is that you don’t sacrifice your citizenship as a journalist. Your job is not to be objective,” he told The Bulwark’s Tim Miller in a Substack interview in June.
“There is no Mount Olympus of objectivity where a Mandarin class of wise people have no feelings about their society,” he continued. “We’re all in this together. What you have to be is fair and accurate.”
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