ABC News spent decades telling Americans it was a straight-shooting, down-the-middle news operation.
Turns out, one of their own veterans just blew a hole in that story.
And the admission came from someone who spent nearly three decades inside the building.
Nobody at ABC Voted for Trump
Terry Moran worked at ABC News from 1997 to 2025. He anchored Nightline, served as chief White House correspondent, and spent years as senior national correspondent. That is not a fringe figure talking. That is someone who sat at the center of how ABC News covered American politics for nearly three decades.
And recently, appearing on The Fifth Column podcast, he said the quiet part out loud.
“Is ABC News a liberal institution?” co-host Michael C Moynihan asked. “Yes,” Moran replied, before continuing, “but I think like a lot of mainstream media, it’s because of lack of viewpoint diversity.
“That was one of the problems in covering Trump — nobody had voted for him.”
Let that sit for a second. Not one reporter. Not one producer. Not one assignment editor who had punched a ballot for the man they were supposed to cover objectively. That is not a minor staffing quirk. That is a structural problem that shaped every editorial decision the network made for years.
Moran went on to say that mainstream reporters are certainly inside a “bubble.” Which is a polite way of describing something that is actually much more corrosive — a newsroom so ideologically uniform that reporters covering half the country had no personal frame of reference for why that half of the country voted the way it did.
This is what the Make America Healthy Again movement and the broader America First coalition have been saying for years. The legacy press does not just lean left. It is staffed, top to bottom, by people who share the same politics, the same neighborhoods, the same cultural assumptions, and the same instinctive contempt for the voters they are supposed to cover. Moran did not use those exact words. But the math he described leads directly there.
The Stephen Miller Post and What It Actually Revealed
Moran’s admission on The Fifth Column came with a fair amount of context about his own departure from the network.
He pivoted to talking about ABC letting him go after he ripped Trump and White House advisor Stephen Miller, whom he said was “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred.”
Moran was dropped from the network for attacking President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller on social media. ABC News confirmed, “We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran and based on his recent post — which was a clear violation of ABC News policies — we have made the decision to not renew.”
But here is where it gets interesting. Moran did not express regret about what he believed. He expressed regret about the platform he chose.
Moran said he would “stand by [his criticism] as an accurate and fair description of Stephen Miller.” He said the only mistake he made was he would have been better off slamming Miller and Trump in an article for The New Yorker, not on ABC.
Read that carefully. His complaint was not that he let his bias show. His complaint was that he let it show in the wrong venue. The implication being that the same sentiments, dressed up in the more respectable packaging of a prestige magazine, would have been perfectly fine. Which tells you everything about how people in that world think about the difference between journalism and opinion — there is not one, as long as the opinion is the right kind.
“One of the things that was striking to me was how many people who voted for Trump were very angry at me because I betrayed what they thought I had been, which was, when I covered it, I covered it straight,” Moran said.
And there it is. Trump voters had extended good faith to Moran for years, assuming they were getting straight coverage. He now acknowledges that the newsroom producing that coverage had zero ideological diversity and that the reporters inside it had no personal connection to the people they were covering. That is not straight journalism. That is a monoculture pretending to be a mirror.
What This Means for Everyone Who Trusted ABC News
The broader media bias story is not new. Conservatives have been making this argument since at least the 1990s. What is new is the source.
Moran spent 28 years at ABC. He is not a right-wing media critic. He is not a think-tank researcher with an axe to grind. He is a veteran of the institution describing its internal culture from the inside, and what he described is a newsroom that could not cover Donald Trump fairly because nobody in the building had voted for him.
That is not a political attack. That is a description of a structural failure. And it explains a lot — the breathless coverage of every Trump controversy, the credulous amplification of narratives that later fell apart, the consistent framing of his supporters as something foreign and inexplicable rather than as half the American electorate with legitimate concerns about their country.
But Moran’s admission also raises a question he did not fully answer. If the problem was lack of viewpoint diversity, what was being done about it? The answer, apparently, was nothing. For nearly three decades, the network hired from the same ideological pool, promoted the same kinds of people, and produced coverage that reflected those assumptions. And when a reporter finally let the mask slip on social media, the response was not self-examination. It was a contract non-renewal and a statement about objectivity standards.
ABC News telling the public it holds reporters to “the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism” while running a newsroom where, by its own veteran’s account, nobody had voted for the Republican president they were covering — that is a punchline, not a policy.
The American people deserve a press that actually reflects the country it covers. What Moran described is the opposite: an insular institution that spent years producing coverage shaped entirely by one ideological perspective, then expressed shock when the audience stopped trusting it.
That is not a media problem. That is an accountability problem. And the fact that it took a firing to get one of their own to say it publicly tells you how deep the bubble actually goes.
Sources: Mediaite; Fox News; The Daily Beast; Deadline; Newsweek