Former ABC News reporter Terry Moran, who was fired from the network for a social media rant against a White House aide, now is comparing President Donald Trump to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and claims the U.S. will lose its free press if Trump is not “stopped.”
Moran made his latest criticisms on the Substack channel of former MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, another former TV news star who left his long-running show “Hardball” in disgrace in 2020 following accusations of making inappropriate comments about women.
ABC fired Moran in June for posting a blistering social media rant against Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller. The dismissal ended a 28-year-career at the network.
Moran’s latest diatribe — which critics would say confirms the reporter’s biased mindset when he was purportedly a mainstream reporter at ABC — was sparked by Matthews lamenting the recent CBS/ Paramount settlement with Trump.
“Is this going to keep going?” Matthews asked, wondering if other networks and publications would “grovel” before President Trump.
Moran told Matthews:
I think they’re going to, at some point, get rid of the news divisions, is my prediction. 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.
Moran then cited a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation of his former employer over debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis’s fact-checking of Trump during the 2024 presidential debate while sparring with 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,” Moran said.
He continued, “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.”
Matthews chimed in with CBS’s cancelling of the “Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert” as another example, describing it not as comedy and entertainment hour but a “politically thoughtful show.”
Moran also said he’s heard from “book agents” that publishers don’t want to do books critical of President Trump because the major corporations that own them fear reprisals.
“The shadow is lengthening over our civil society,” Moran said. “We’ve seen it in other countries. It’s now happening to us.”
Moran did take a moment to also be critical of the Democratic Party.
“I think the Democrats have a special problem because they don’t know what they believe in anymore or what they should say to the American people,” he said. “How do they fix that?”
Moran also criticized the Biden administration’s border policy that allowed millions of illegal aliens into the country with “watered down” asylum rules.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for
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