00:01He was a leading journalist at the network ABC and serving most notably as a White House correspondent.
00:09He grilled Donald Trump back in April in a television interview.
00:13With us is Terry Moran, who was let go by ABC, its parent company, which is trying to buy these cable channels.
00:19This after a late night tweet that criticized Donald Trump and his éminence grise Stephen Miller.
00:30Terry Moran, thanks for being with us here on France 24.
00:33Glad to be with you.
00:35First off, your reaction to this suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show.
00:42You know, stunned but not shocked, really.
00:45This is something now that we are getting used to.
00:47Not just that Trump, like every petty autocrat, believes that his whims, his wishes, his resentments will be the law, but that the corporations will always knuckle under, right?
01:03I mean, that's what we're discovering, which is that at the slightest pressure, you know, Jimmy Kimmel didn't even really say anything that bad, you know.
01:12And even if he did, really, it's supposed to be a country with free speech.
01:16But the corporations fear for the bottom line, for the dollars, and they collapse at every breath of anger from Donald Trump.
01:27And that's what happened here.
01:28Is this something new?
01:30Yes.
01:34Yes, this is something new.
01:35Look, we've had cancel culture in the United States, excuse me, on the left and on the right, when people mobilized to ostracize or silence someone who said something they didn't like.
01:48It's kind of like a boycott.
01:49Sometimes politicians participate, but this was the power of the presidency and of the person directly responsible for regulating the broadcast networks saying, you can do it the hard way or the easy way.
02:04You get rid of this guy or we come in.
02:07That fist has never been used by any president that I can think of before like this.
02:12Yeah, and again, there was this head of the broadcast authority in the United States, the FCC.
02:18He made this threat before Kimmel was let go effectively.
02:24Speaking on the show of a conservative podcast host, Brendan Carr.
02:29Let's take a listen to him who went further.
02:31All right, this is the clip that was played earlier by, that we showed you earlier.
02:48He goes on to list all the, basically all the scalps he's had, including yours, Terry Moran.
02:53First off, should the head of a broadcast authority be appearing on a conservative talk show host's podcast?
03:05Well, I mean, podcasts are a new form of communication.
03:08I don't mind that.
03:08He doesn't have any jurisdiction over them.
03:10The odd thing is that the Federal Communications Commission was set up in the 1930s.
03:15And so its jurisdiction is over broadcasters through the airwaves, right?
03:20And podcasts generally come over, you know, streaming services and your cable or whatever it is.
03:25Very different thing.
03:27That's it.
03:27Yeah, he should, he can be out there.
03:29What he shouldn't be doing is essentially making their demands the law.
03:35ABC would have won this case in court if the head of the broadcast authority said,
03:40I want to take away the licenses from ABC affiliates.
03:44The first one would have gone to court and say he made a joke that maybe he didn't like.
03:49That is not the power of the broadcast authority of the president of the United States.
03:53But that broadcast authority would have had the authority to shoot down this deal to buy television stations that it's looking for.
04:03Now, that's a great point.
04:04So they find every pressure point that they can and exploit it.
04:08And there is this giant deal, a multi-billion dollar deal going down, having to do with the local stations.
04:16And one company wants to buy some from another company.
04:19They will need the approval of the broadcast authority.
04:22And that's the pressure point.
04:24And Disney folded.
04:25Terry Moran, you've been a war correspondent, a White House correspondent.
04:29You've been all over the world.
04:31Today, are you unhirable on a U.S. television network?
04:40Well, I'm going on CNN a couple of times a week.
04:44I don't think so.
04:45But frankly, this is the next media.
04:49The next U.S. presidential campaign will take place in new spaces.
04:53You know, Substack, YouTube, Axe, whatever.
04:57Much more so than on the traditional broadcast networks.
04:59I had a great career.
05:00I loved it.
05:01I left on an accelerated schedule.
05:03But into something that I think is much more promising.
05:07What I am is heartbroken.
05:10I can't believe it feels like I'm losing my country with this.
05:16They fired me.
05:17Fine.
05:18They didn't like what I wrote.
05:19Whatever.
05:19It's their company.
05:21But the fact that they're doing it again and again and again and paying Trump money and the law firms and
05:27corporations just bending the knee to the exercise of a personalized presidential power like nothing we've ever seen.
05:34It feels like like I'm losing something precious.
05:38I don't think we will in the long run.
05:40I think he's overreaching.
05:41I think the mass of American public don't want a radical change in the Constitution.
05:47But it's a scary moment.
05:49And for people who are going into journalism who might be self-censoring, out of fear, the old adage, you're supposed to speak truth to power.
05:59For them, is this reversible, what's happening now?
06:04Or has the United States crossed a point of no return?
06:10I don't want to say that the United States has crossed a point of no return.
06:14I don't believe that.
06:15But the combination of oligarchical power in media and in social media and a movement, the Trumpist movement, which is trying to centralize power in themselves and make it impossible for the other side to win again.
06:30We've seen this again and again around the world.
06:34That's where we are.
06:35But I don't think they win at the end of the day.
06:38At the end of the day, the mass of Americans, the great muddled middle of this country, doesn't want a radical change.
06:45They want pragmatic policies that will help them live better.
06:48This is a vengeance tour by people who've been angry at the media over the years.
06:53And Trump is just the guy to do it for them.
06:56But it's a close-run thing right now.
06:59Terry Moran, so many thanks for speaking with us here on France 24.
