BS BULLETIN:

• Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran says he tried to pursue a story about Joe Biden’s condition in late 2023 or early 2024.
• Moran says ABC management shut him down “very hard,” telling him Biden’s health was the medical unit’s business.
• The proposed report would have come months before Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate transformed questions about his age and condition into a political crisis.

Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran says he saw the Joe Biden story coming — and his network wouldn’t let him pursue it.

Moran told The Daily Beast Podcast that concerns began building after he traveled with Biden to Japan in spring 2023 and observed the then-president up close.

Moran said Biden was still functioning but appeared extremely frail.

By late 2023 or early 2024, Moran said, he believed Biden’s condition had become a legitimate issue for voters and wanted to report on it.

“I tried to do the story of Biden’s health before anybody else did in network, because I’d seen it,” Moran said. “And I got shut down very hard.”

Moran said he wasn’t attempting to diagnose Biden.

Instead, he argued internally that a president’s observable condition was a legitimate subject of reporting, particularly as voters considered whether to elect Biden to another four-year term.

According to Moran, he even put his case in writing to ABC editors.

The response?

Moran said he was told Biden’s health was “the medical unit’s business, it’s not yours.”

There is a distinction worth making.

Moran had publicly discussed Biden’s age on ABC before the alleged rejection. During an April 2023 appearance on This Week, he said his sense was that most Americans didn’t want an 81-year-old running for president. In that discussion, he also raised Donald Trump’s age and said voters appeared interested in generational change.

What Moran says ABC rejected later was a dedicated story examining Biden’s condition based partly on what Moran himself had observed.

The timing is what makes the allegation significant.

Months later, Biden’s halting performance during his June 27, 2024 debate against Trump triggered an extraordinary political crisis. Democratic lawmakers, donors and allies began publicly questioning whether Biden could continue as the party’s nominee.

Biden ultimately abandoned his reelection campaign on July 21.

Moran’s account suggests one ABC correspondent wanted to scrutinize the issue well before that debate.

ABC News has not publicly provided its version of the internal exchange described by Moran. Mediaite said the network did not immediately respond to its request for comment.

Moran spent 28 years at ABC before the network declined to renew his contract in 2025 after he posted highly personal criticism of Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller. ABC said at the time that journalists were expected to maintain standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism.

Since leaving, Moran has become increasingly critical of his former employer.

Last month, he accused ABC of having a deep-rooted liberal bias that affected its journalism.

Now he’s describing an example involving perhaps the biggest media controversy of the 2024 campaign: what reporters knew about Biden, what they saw — and when they decided it was news.

MY QUICK TAKE

Here’s the part that should bother journalists more than Republicans.

Moran didn’t need a neurologist to tell him whether Joe Biden had a disease. That wasn’t the story he says he wanted to report.

The story was that the man asking Americans for four more years looked dramatically different to a veteran White House correspondent who had watched presidents up close for decades.

That is called reporting.

And “the medical unit handles that” is a fascinating bureaucratic escape hatch. Apparently a reporter may observe the president negotiating with Japan, speaking to voters and climbing Air Force One — but if he observes the president himself, somebody call Human Resources.

The political consequence was enormous. When the debate finally made Biden’s condition impossible to treat as a secondary issue, Democrats didn’t merely have a bad news cycle. They had to change presidential candidates four months before Election Day.

Moran says he wanted to ask the uncomfortable question months earlier. So where were his principals back then?

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

• Mediaite — Terry Moran says ABC blocked his Biden health story
• Twitchy — Moran says ABC shut down proposed Biden health report
• Newsmax — Former ABC reporter says network blocked Biden health story
• Associated Press — ABC parts ways with Terry Moran in 2025