ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on

How to behave on social media has bedeviled journalists and confounded editors for years. Marty Baron clashed with reporters Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez over their provocative Twitter comments back when he was executive editor of The Washington Post, and those are just two well-known examples.

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The latest journalist to run afoul of his news organization’s social-media standards is Terry Moran, who was, until Tuesday, employed by ABC News. Moran was suspended on Sunday after he tweeted that White House official Stephen Miller and President Trump is each a “world-class hater.” The tweet is now gone, but I’ve included an image. On Tuesday, Moran’s employer announced that they were parting company with him, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes.

I think ABC was right to suspend Moran but wrong to get rid of him, and that media critic Margaret Sullivan got the nuances perfectly when she wrote this for her newsletter, American Crisis:

I’m amazed that Moran posted what he did. It’s well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do. It’s more than just calling a lie a lie, or identifying a statement as racist — all of which I think is necessary. Moran is not a pundit or a columnist or any other kind of opinion journalist….

I would hate to see Moran — with his worthy career at ABC News, where he’s been for almost 30 years — lose his job over this. I hope that the honchos at ABC let a brief suspension serve its purpose, and put him back to work.

Unfortunately, this is ABC News, whose corporate owner, Disney, disgraced itself earlier this year by paying $15 million to settle a libel suit brought by Trump over a minor, non-substantive error: George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll when, in fact, he’d been found liable for sexual abuse. The federal judge in the Carroll case even said in a ruling that the jury had found Trump “raped” Carroll in the ordinary meaning of the term. But Disney couldn’t wait to prostrate itself before our authoritarian ruler.

So when Moran violated ABC News’ social-media policy, as the organization claimed, he no doubt knew he could expect no mercy.

Now, let me cite Baron again. You sometimes hear people say that journalists should be free to express themselves as they wish on social media. Baron’s response is that a journalist’s social-media presence is an extension of their work, and that the reason they have large followings is because they work for prominent news organizations.

Terry Moran, for example, has 908,000 Twitter followers. Even assuming that number has gone up quite a bit since Sunday, that’s a reflection of his status as a high-profile ABC News journalist.

I have to say that I disagree with those who think Moran deserved the maximum punishment because he played into the hands of media-hating Trump supporters. For instance, Poynter media columnist Tom Jones writes:

I traded emails with another former journalist who told me that, in a group chat with other journalists, they settled on this general point: that maybe what Moran posted was true, but by sending his tweet, he played directly into the hands of those on the right who are trying to undermine trust in the media and, in many ways, damage our democracy.

No. News organizations need to stick to their own ethical standards. Punishing Moran beyond what he deserved as some sort of peace offering to Trump is wrong — as wrong as settling the libel suit earlier this year. Sadly, I doubt that ABC News executives truly believe that Moran deserved to be ousted rather than suspended, but they may have decided they’d take the easy way out because his contract was expiring.

Finally, there is the matter of news organizations’ wanting their journalists to be provocative on social media so that they can reap the benefits but casting them into the nether reaches of hell as soon as they cross the line. Sometimes that line isn’t clearly defined, although Moran surely knew he was way beyond it.

I tell my students that if they find themselves working as straight-news reporters then they shouldn’t express their opinions on social media, especially about topics related to their beat. Even if they’re opinion journalists, they should adhere to the same standards of accuracy and civility they would be expected to meet in their day jobs.

And I hope that Terry Moran soon surfaces somewhere else.

Google to media: Drop dead

About a year ago I wrote about concerns that Google would crush traffic to news websites through its use of artificial intelligence. I thought those concerns were overblown. Well, that was then. I don’t know if Google’s AI tool has gotten much better; opinions vary. But the search behemoth is certainly doing everything it can to shove AI down our throats whether we want it or not.

Now the “AI armageddon” is here, according to The Wall Street Journal (gift link). Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt write that news publishers are finding that incoming traffic from Google is down significantly as Google users simply go with the top-of-the-screen answer that AI gives them rather than clicking through, whether it’s accurate or not. They write:

At the New York Times, the share of traffic coming from organic search to the paper’s desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025 from almost 44% three years earlier, according to Similarweb.

The Wall Street Journal’s traffic from organic search was up in April compared with three years prior, Similarweb data show, though as a share of overall traffic it declined to 24% from 29%.

They also quote Atlantic chief executive Nicholas Thompson as saying, “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine. We have to develop new strategies.”

The only solution is to develop direct relationships with your audience through tech that you control, mainly subscriptions and newsletters. The problem is that Google has long served as the platform by which news organizations are discovered. It’s pretty hard to sell subscriptions and entice people to sign up for newsletters if they don’t know you exist.

Best wishes to Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll keep this relatively short: One of our most influential media critics said Tuesday that he’s retiring from his position as a journalism professor at New York University. He made his announcement on Bluesky and on PressThink, a blog he’s been writing for many years.

“Spoiler alert: I am not leaving the field, or the fight for a public service press,” he wrote.

I’ve been following Jay since the late 1990s, when I reviewed his book “What Are Journalists For?” for The Boston Phoenix. In that book, he recounts his role in the public-journalism movement, an early effort to transform journalism into a conversation between news organizations and the people they serve. That’s been the theme of his entire career.

Jay either coined or popularized phrases such as “the people formerly known as the audience,” “the view from nowhere,” “the production of innocence” and “the savvy style” of political coverage. And there was real intellectual heft behind those phrases. As his interests broadened to encompass how we cover politics, he’s been an eloquent voice for moving away from treating it like a sporting event and more toward substance — “the stakes,” as he would have it.

Among many other things, I’m grateful to Jay for introducing me to a 1986 essay by the late Howard Ziff on what Ziff called the “cosmopolitan” and “provincial” models of journalism. Ziff’s argument was that the provincial model of local-news coverage is based on compassion and participation more than traditional objectivity, and that it’s not inferior to the cosmpolitan model. It’s just different. That insight has informed a lot of my reporting over the years on the local-news crisis and how to solve it.

Best wishes to Jay, and I look forward to seeing what he does next.