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.
Others didn’t understand what exactly had prompted Mr. Moran’s outburst. Was it the recent immigration raids in Los Angeles? Had Mr. Moran watched “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the play about CBS News heroics in the 1950s, live on CNN earlier that night?
And was it even possible to ascertain someone’s innermost “spiritual nourishment” as an outside journalist? (Mr. Moran says he has never met Mr. Miller.)
It “was to me; is to me,” he said. There had been no triggering event, he said, only his own ruminations, which he continues to stand behind: “I don’t think you should ever regret telling the truth. And I don’t.”
Mr. Miller responded to Mr. Moran’s attack by calling it a “full public meltdown” and writing that “Terry pulled off his mask,” exposing himself as among the “radicals adopting a journalist’s pose.”
Mr. Moran declined to address whether his post had made it more difficult for his former ABC News colleagues to carry out their journalistic work. “If they want to reach out, I’m happy to talk about that, but I’m not going to speak in the abstract,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Moran seemed surprised by the post’s reach. “I thought it would hit a nerve, maybe,” he said. He did not grasp the gravity of the incident until ABC News informed him last Sunday that he had been suspended.
He and his employer of 28 years now appear to be at loggerheads.
On Tuesday, ABC News said in a statement that Mr. Moran’s contract had been set to expire, and that, “based on his recent post,” it would not be renewed. Mr. Moran disputed this framing as “incorrect,” and said that the network was “bailing” on a pre-existing “oral agreement” to renew him for three more years.
“We had a deal,” Mr. Moran said, adding that lawyers were still negotiating the terms of his exit and severance.
ABC News declined to comment.
Shortly after leaving ABC, Mr. Moran began posting to Substack. Originally known for email newsletters, Substack has become a destination for journalists and anchors who have departed or been forced to depart traditional outlets, earning some of them millions in subscription revenue, particularly those with anti-Trump leanings.
Mr. Moran’s brief dispatches are, so far, free to read, and since Tuesday, his subscriber count has reached over 90,000. That includes thousands who have purchased subscriptions for $5 per month or $50 per year in support.
While he is still formulating an editorial plan — he is interested, for example, in revisiting Springfield, Ohio, where he previously reported on Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations about Haitian immigrants eating household pets — he is also “generally trying to have fun,” he said.
Mr. Moran, who peppered his responses with quotes from the Bible and “Alice in Wonderland,” at one point compared Substack to a version of “18th century pamphleteering.”
The upside: “I’m certainly free to speak my mind.”
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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