Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran says he tried to report on Joe Biden’s declining health in late 2023 and early 2024 — before most of the press corps would touch the subject — and was shut down hard by network leadership.
Moran, who traveled with Biden to Japan in the spring of 2023, told The Daily Beast podcast he saw the signs firsthand. “I kind of eyeballed him there, and I thought, ‘Okay, he’s still functioning, but man, he’s frail.’ He looked like he’d blow away in a stiff wind,” Moran said. He added that by Biden’s final year in office, the president’s voice was reduced to a “whisper.”
“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 says he pitched the story to his editors as carefully as he could. “It was like, ‘You know, this is [a] legit issue for Americans to be interested in,'” he said. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not diagnosing. But we all know what we know when we see people fading. We all have had grandparents. We’re all getting old ourselves. And so there’s no doubt about it, this is a legitimate concern for the voters of America.”
ABC leadership rejected the pitch outright, according to Moran, telling him the president’s health was “the medical unit’s business, not yours.”
Fox News Digital reached out to ABC News for comment and did not immediately receive a response.
A network already at odds with Moran
Moran, a longtime ABC correspondent, parted ways with the network after a since-deleted social media post on X in which he called President Donald Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller “world-class haters.” An ABC News spokesperson said at the time: “We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran and based on his recent post — which was a clear violation of ABC News policies — we have made the decision to not renew.”
The bigger pattern
Biden’s health and mental sharpness while in office have drawn intense scrutiny since he left the White House, with multiple books and reports alleging his aides worked to hide the extent of his decline from the public. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson co-authored “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” built on more than 200 interviews, which makes the case that Biden’s inner circle concealed his condition.
Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert told Fox News Digital that Moran was simply doing the job reporters are supposed to do. “Moran was doing exactly what reporters are paid to do: he noticed something and wanted to ask questions about it,” Alpert said. “You don’t have to diagnose Biden to report that he appeared different. We make observations about people every day without knowing the medical explanation for them. Saying ‘I see a change’ and saying ‘I know what’s causing that change’ are completely different statements.”
Alpert said institutional avoidance is a common human failing. “It’s also a very human tendency to avoid information that creates a problem for us,” he said. “Sometimes it’s easier not to look too closely and that seems to be exactly what ABC was doing.”
“I think what ultimately hurts credibility is the gap between what the public thinks is obvious and what an institution is willing to acknowledge,” Alpert added. “The wider that gap gets, the more people start wondering whether they’re getting the whole story. A journalist’s job is to be willing to ask the questions, even without knowing all the answers.”
