Jon Stewart had some strong words Thursday for ABC News, calling the organization a “f**king joke.”
The network, which agreed last year to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit, said Tuesday it had decided to not renew Terry Moran’s contract — after the reporter criticized senior White House aide Stephen Miller on social media.
Stewart discussed the matter on his “Weekly Show” podcast with Jill Lepore, a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, and minced no words answering a listener’s question asking whether ABC should’ve “fired’ Moran.
“Of course not,” Stewart said. “So stupid. No, for God’s sakes, ‘Should they have fired him?’”
“They shouldn’t have paid the $15 million, they shouldn’t have fired him,” he argued. “Literally every day on Fox News they’re taking stuff out of context, or their people are saying utterly vicious things about Democratic politicians and all kinds of other things.”
Stewart echoed numerous other pundits, political figures and publications in condemning the network, and argued Thursday that “ABC clings to this facade that they somehow exist in a bubble.”
He said plainly, “It’s a joke. They’re a fucking joke.”
ABC News agreed in December to settle a defamation suit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that Trump was found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. On Sunday, it suspended Moran for a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,” Moran wrote earlier that morning in a since-deleted post. “He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.”
Left: Lorenzo Bevilaqua/ABC/Getty Images; Right: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
The network announced Tuesday that Moran won’t be returning, and told HuffPost that his words were in “clear violation of ABC News policies.” Stewart argued Thursday that this seeming strategy to appease Trump is useless against a vindictive administration.
“The problem with it all is there’s no level of fealty that is enough,” he said on his podcast. “You’ve seen him attack Fox News. That is literally like a 24-hour Trump ball-polishing machine.”
He continued, “What does he always say whenever he gets asked a question? ‘That’s a terrible question. Why don’t you ever just thank me?’”
Moran has since announced that he will continue his journalistic work on Substack.
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