What happened to Terry Moran: Echos of Edward R. Murrow

You seldom see anything really new on television. But this weekend proved an exception. For the first time ever, we saw the live performance of a Broadway play: CNN’s broadcast of the hit Broadway show “Good Night, and Good Luck,” starring George Clooney. 

It was an entertainment triumph. The acting was superb. The story was compelling. The staging was excellent. There were no commercial breaks. And the play’s powerful message could not have been more timely.

Indeed, the story of how legendary CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow took on the phony anti-communist campaign of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) is an ominous foretelling of what we are witnessing today. Murrow exposed the lack of evidence behind McCarthy’s attacks on alleged communists in the State Department. McCarthy fought back, accusing Murrow himself of being a communist sympathizer. And CBS folded, demoting Murrow from prime-time Tuesday night to low-rated Sunday afternoon. 

Sound familiar? In fact, the very next day, Murrow’s experience from the 1950s played out again in real time. In a personal tweet, ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran called President Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “world-class haters.” The White House protested. And ABC folded, suspending Moran indefinitely.  

Now, one could argue that Moran has earned his reputation as one of America’s best journalists. In April, President Trump even chose Moran for his first second-term Oval Office interview. One could also argue that their anti-immigrant rhetoric in the first and second Trump terms qualify Trump and Miller as “world-class haters.” But that’s an argument for another day. 

The important point for today is: This latest media blow-up over Terry Moran should worry anybody who believes in how important a free media is to our democracy. Because it proves once again how incredibly thin-skinned are members of the Trump administration, starting with the president himself — and how shamefully spineless are the CEOs of the nation’s media companies.

This, of course, is not the first time ABC folded. In December 2024, it paid Trump $15 million rather than fight a defamation lawsuit many legal scholars said ABC could easily have won. Other media chiefs have been equally spineless. Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times killed editorials endorsing Kamala Harris. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg paid Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit and tossed in another $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund. Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, is reportedly considering settling a baseless Trump lawsuit challenging how “60 Minutes” edited its interview with Kamala Harris in October 2024.

The collective, corporate caving-in to Donald Trump is disgusting. Especially in light of the fact that Trump has only intensified his own attacks on the media, to which he still applies the Stalinesque label “enemy of the American people.”  

During his first term, Trump lobbed personal attacks against many White House reporters. He called then-CNN reporter Jim Acosta “a rude, terrible person” and temporarily suspended him from the press corps. He viciously attacked NBC’s Peter Alexander, calling him a “terrible reporter” for asking a “nasty question.” He singled out three African-American female reporters for contempt, accusing CNN’s Abby Phillip of asking “a stupid question,” describing then-Urban Radio Network’s April Ryan as “a loser,” and calling NPR’s Yamiche Alcindor a “racist.” He dismissed NBC’s Katy Tur as a “third-rate reporter,” and ridiculed the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman as a “Crooked H flunkie.” 

Trump Two has brought more of the same. The White House has exiled Associated Press for refusing to adopt the “Gulf of America.” Some outlets have been banned from the press pool. The president routinely asks reporters whom they work for before answering, or belittling, their questions. He has targeted for personal abuse the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, ABC’s Rachel Scott, and even Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, whom he called “absolutely terrible.”  

But what happened to Terry Moran proves that media criticism is a one-way street. The president and his aides can level the most vicious personal attacks against reporters, but if any reporter dares fire back, he or she could well be fired for telling the truth. 

Edward R. Murrow summed up the difficulties he faced at CBS in attempting to reporting the facts about McCarthy in this chilling phrase: “The terror is in this room.” The same could be said of many newsrooms today. Under such unrelenting attacks, it makes you wonder whether a free and independent media can even survive. 

Good night, and good luck. 

Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”