Terry Moran, the longtime “national correspondent” who was recently fired by ABC News after posting a humiliating tweet, has resurfaced with a spitfire take right out of 2014: Yes, the dying news media are biased, he argues, but not on purpose!
That laughably deficient assessment was offered by Moran last week on his personal website and then credulously shared by the otherwise decent journalist Mark Halperin on Sunday via social media. “Were we biased? Yes,” wrote Moran. “Almost inadvertently, I’d say. ABC News has the same problem so many leading cultural institutions do in America: A lack of viewpoint diversity.”
He wrote later on in the same article, “There are hardly any people who supported Donald Trump at ABC News—or the other corporate/legacy/mainstream news networks,” which he said, “is bound to impact coverage, not so much out of malevolent bias (that’s the cartoon version peddled by Trump, [Federal Communications Commission Chairman] Brendan Carr and online MAGA), but more out of what is a kind of deafness.” (“Amazing stuff,” as Halperin inexplicably described it.)
Again, this is the kind of naive, if not flat-out fraudulent analysis of the news media that might have been worth considering before the 2016 campaign. Not today. Not for a second.
It’s true that there was a time when most — maybe even the vast majority — of media negligence, inaccuracy, and otherwise broad malfeasance could be attributed to the ignorance, incompetence, or even just petulance of homely nerds in Washington and New York. It was often their way of compensating for some personal shortcoming like a lack of social grace or athleticism. That’s not what predominantly motivates the media anymore, and it hasn’t been for the past decade.
Now the overriding aim is deliberate deception and manipulation for more overt political purposes. No serious person can dispute it, though Terry Moran voluntarily revealed himself as an unserious person back in June when he posted a hysterical rant on X at midnight about Donald Trump and White House Adviser Stephen Miller, who Moran said “eats his hate” for “spiritual nourishment.” (Terry identifies as a middle-aged heterosexual male, if you can believe it.)
No one can have possibly witnessed 2024 and come out of it thinking, Well, maybe the media have a bit of a blind spot. It was not “deafness” when they committed to the Herculean effort of making over Kamala Harris, attempting to transition her from being a well-known Washington joke into a legitimate presidential candidate. Everyone in town, especially the media, knew she was drowning as vice president, but the second she became the only politically realistic alternative to Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee, they dropped everything, hoisted her on their shoulders, and sprinted toward the finish line.
Before that, they assisted the White House in lying to the public about the physical and mental health of our president, brazenly risking our national security while further destroying their credibility. They didn’t do that because they’re hard of hearing or because there’s a “lack of viewpoint diversity.” They’re manifestly devoted to a political cause — the survival of the anti-democratic federal bureaucracy.
Long gone are the days of theorizing what colors the biases of the dying news media and offering correctives that might shore up their credibility. They’re in the late stage of their rabies-like illness, still dangerous but rapidly deteriorating. That’s for the best.
