Terry Moran traveled with Joe Biden to Japan in the spring of 2023. He watched. He saw what we all saw. And when he came back to ABC News and tried to report on it, his bosses told him it was "the medical unit's business, it's not yours."
The medical unit. As if a sitting president visibly declining on the world stage was a clinical question and not a national security one.
Moran, who spent 28 years at ABC News from 1997 to 2025, made the admission on The Daily Beast's podcast on Sunday. "In late 2023, early 2024, you know, it was pretty clear that Biden was fading rather quickly," Moran said. "I tried to do the story of Biden's health before anybody else did in network, because I'd seen it. And I got shut down very hard."
A veteran correspondent with nearly three decades at the network tried to report a legitimate story about the President of the United States' mental decline, and the network brass told him he couldn't report that news to the American people.
Moran didn't claim any special medical expertise. "I'm not a doctor, I'm not diagnosing — but we all know what we know when we see people fading," he said. And he's right. We did know. Every voter who watched Biden freeze at a podium or wander away from a group photo knew. The difference is that Moran had a camera crew and a platform with millions of viewers, and ABC made sure he never used either.
This wasn't one network making one bad editorial call. CNN's Jake Tapper admitted there was "not enough" coverage of Biden's health issues by mainstream press — a rare concession from a network that spent most of 2023 assuring audiences that Biden was sharp as a tack behind closed doors. Axios reporter Alex Thompson had been reporting on Biden's limited schedule and physical decline, and the rest of the press corps treated him like he was being rude at a dinner party.
The timeline matters. Moran says he pushed for the story in late 2023, early 2024 — months before the June 2024 debate where Biden's condition became undeniable on live television. ABC had the story. They had the reporter willing to do it. They had the firsthand observations from an overseas trip. They chose to bury it.
ABC eventually parted ways with Moran in 2025 after he publicly criticized President Trump and White House advisor Stephen Miller, whom Moran described as "richly endowed with the capacity for hatred." So the network that wouldn't let him report on a president's cognitive decline had no trouble letting him editorialize about the next one — right up until the editorializing cost them a big chunk of money.
A reporter sees the story. His network kills it. The president stumbles through another year of public appearances. The network fires the reporter for a different opinion. The story turns out to be true.
That's not journalism. That's reputation management with a press badge.