Terry Moran Admits ABC News Had Zero Trump Voters in Its Newsroom

Terry Moran spent years inside ABC News, and now he’s saying out loud what half the country has been screaming at their television screens for nearly a decade. The network is liberal. Not sort of liberal. Not accidentally tilted. Just plain liberal.

When Michael Moynihan asked him point blank on The Fifth Column podcast whether ABC News is a liberal institution, Moran didn’t dance around it. “Yes,” he said. Then he explained why, and this is where it gets interesting. It’s not because journalists wake up plotting to destroy conservatives. It’s simpler and somehow worse. “It’s because of lack of viewpoint diversity,” Moran said. “That was one of the problems in covering Trump. Nobody had voted for him.”

Nobody. Think about that for a second. In a newsroom tasked with explaining America to Americans, not a single person could relate to the 63 million voters who pulled the lever for Donald Trump in 2016. That’s not journalism. That’s an echo chamber with a broadcast license.

Moran tried to fix it from the inside. He sent internal emails urging fairness in Trump coverage. You know who thanked him? Engineers and the occasional producer. Not the reporters. Not the anchors. The people who actually decide what gets on air stayed silent or, according to sources, pushed back hard. He became the guy nobody wanted to sit with at lunch because he kept suggesting maybe they should try understanding half the country instead of dismissing them.

Here’s the thing about viewpoint diversity. It’s not about hiring token conservatives to check a box. It’s about recognizing that when everyone in your newsroom went to the same schools, lives in the same neighborhoods, and shares the same assumptions about how the world works, you’re going to miss stories. Big ones. You’re going to misread elections. You’re going to be genuinely shocked when your preferred candidate loses because you’ve insulated yourself from reality.

The network ultimately cut ties with Moran after he posted something calling Trump and Stephen Miller world-class haters. He deleted it, but the damage was done. ABC said it violated their policies on impartiality. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife. They fire him for bias after he spent years trying to get them to acknowledge their own.

An ABC staffer told reporters the network had no choice, especially “in these times.” Translation: trust in media is cratering, and we can’t afford more scandals. Broadcast news is hemorrhaging viewers to independent creators and podcasts because people are tired of being lectured by journalists who clearly despise them. Legacy media is finally waking up to the fact that credibility, once lost, doesn’t come back just because you issue a stern statement reaffirming your commitment to fairness.

The free market is handling this problem better than any ethics committee ever could. When networks ignore half their potential audience, that audience finds other sources. They watch YouTube. They listen to podcasts. They read Substack newsletters written by people who don’t pretend to be objective while pushing a clear agenda.

What Moran exposed isn’t unique to ABC. It’s the entire mainstream media apparatus. Newsrooms in New York and Washington are filled with people who’ve never met a Trump voter they didn’t immediately write off as ignorant or bigoted. They cover flyover country like anthropologists studying a primitive tribe, always from a safe distance, always with barely concealed contempt.

Individual liberty includes the freedom to think differently. Limited government means the press shouldn’t act as propaganda for either party. Free-market capitalism will eventually sort out which news organizations survive and which ones collapse under the weight of their own bias. But traditional principles, the ones that used to govern journalism, demanded fairness even when it was uncomfortable. Especially when it was uncomfortable.

Moran’s confession won’t change much at ABC. They’ll keep doing what they’re doing until the revenue numbers force a reckoning. But it matters that he said it. It matters that someone on the inside confirmed what everyone outside already knew. The emperor has no clothes, and one of his former tailors just admitted it on a podcast.

The networks can keep pretending they’re neutral arbiters of truth. They can keep hiring from the same pool of coastal elites who all think the same way. But the audience is walking away. And honestly, can you blame them?