ABC is too cowed to state the obvious about Stephen Miller
The road to fascism is paved with "objectivity" and "civility."
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“[Stephen] Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world class hater,” ABC News correspondent Terry Moran tweeted early Sunday morning.
It was an unusually frank, and unusually accurate, mainstream media assessment of Miller, and of Trump — who Moran also called a “world-class hater.” As White House deputy chief of staff, Miller’s far-right bigotry has guided Trump’s brutally authoritarian anti-immigrant policies.
Mainstream media has a duty to inform its audience that those policies are in fact hateful. But it rarely does so. Moran is to be commended for speaking truth to power. Speaking truth to power is, after all, what journalists are supposed to do.
Unfortunately, ABC News, like much of corporate media, does not want to speak truth to power, or, it seems, to anyone. Trump and Miller were offended by Moran’s (accurate) description, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration reached out to ABC on Sunday morning demanding action.
“Hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated,” Leavitt huffed to Maria Bartiromo.
Sure enough, an hour later Moran was suspended; his tweet had already been deleted.
“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” an ABC spokesperson told CNN. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.”
ABC claims it is motivated by the values of objectivity and impartiality. But what about the value of independence — or, for that matter, the value of truth?
The Trump administration has launched a full scale and ongoing assault on freedom of the press. In the face of that assault, ABC (and not just ABC) has repeatedly cowered and groveled, fluttering the bedraggled flag of “objectivity” as a way of distracting from its craven debasement. It’s an ugly spectacle, not least because it encourages and effectively cosigns the hatred that Moran was disciplined for repudiating.
Yes, Miller is hateful
ABC claims it suspended Moran because it “does not condone subjective personal attacks.” But calling Miller “hateful” is not a slur and not even really an insult. It’s a statement that Miller is motivated by bigotry and animus. And there is a lot of evidence that he is.
In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch released an investigation into Miller which revealed that he had shared emails with far right outlet Breitbart. The emails included links to white nationalist websites like VDARE and American Renaissance, and expressed Miller’s relentless animosity towards non-white immigrants.
“Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born,” SPLC wrote.
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Miller also repeatedly referenced “The Camp of the Saints,” Jean Raspail’s paranoid fear-mongering anti-immigrant novel. It has become a touchstone for the far right because of its vivid fictionalization of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which warns of a shadowy scheme to increase immigration and thereby subjugate the native born.
Great Replacement conspiracies have motivated multiple violent hate crimes, including a mass shooting in a Buffalo grocery store in 2022, a 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 2018 mass shooting at Tree of Life cemetery in Pittsburgh, the largest antisemitic massacre in US history.
But you don’t really need to go to Miller’s private emails to find evidence of his hatred. In early May, for example, he gave an address to reporters in which he spewed the kind of paranoid extremist rhetoric you’d expect from someone who frequents white nationalist websites.
Shouting and banging the podium, Miller said the mainstream media took the side of “terrorists” when it treated undocumented immigrants with any sympathy, and claimed they were advancing the “cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country.”
Miller then took a moment to pivot from his preferred anti-immigrant bigotry to target another marginalized group. In support of the administration’s ugly anti-trans policies, he claimed hospitals spend “taxpayer dollars to perform chemical castration and sexual mutilation of children.” He also warned that girls in school would be “sexually assaulted because school districts have allowed men into women’s and girls’ private spaces.” (There is no evidence that trans women are a danger to other women.)
In short, Miller is familiar with and influenced by white nationalist websites, books, and talking points. His public rhetoric is angry, paranoid, violent, and conspiratorial. Characterizing him as a “world-class hater” is dramatic and colorful. But it is not slander and it is not inaccurate. On the contrary, given Miller’s frightening beliefs and vast power, we need reporters to vividly alert their audience to his actual commitments.
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ABC kisses the boot
ABC, though, does not want to inform its viewers about Miller’s extensive documented history of hate. Instead, they want “impartial” reporting — that is, bland, inoffensive, mealy-mouthed “journalism” which is acceptable to the hateful fascists in power.
This isn’t the first example of ABC caving to the Trump administration. During the 2024 campaign, anchor George Stephanopoulos noted on air that Donald Trump had been found civilly liable of raping writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump sued ABC, saying he had not been found liable of rape since the judgement was technically for sexual assault. The judge in the case, Lewis A. Kaplan, however, wrote that the finding of sexual abuse implicitly acknowledged that Trump had penetrated Carroll digitally against her will.
“Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law,” Kaplan said.
Given the judge’s statement, given the high bar for libel claims for public figures, and given that Trump lost his civil suit with Carroll, it seems likely that ABC could have won the case. But after Trump won the election, the company settled for $16 million.
Media reporter Oliver Darcy argued that the decision to settle was probably made by ABC’s parent company Disney. The corporate media is increasingly concentrated; it’s also “less financially robust” than in the past, according to University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones. Sprawling entertainment conglomerates see news as a niche market, not as a responsibility, and they don’t want the not very lucrative niche harming the rest of their business. Fighting for democracy just isn’t profitable.
Trump is very aware of this dynamic and of his leverage. That was apparent in an April interview he did with Moran on ABC in which he asserted that Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a man Trump mistakenly and illegally deported to El Salvador — had gang tattoos on his hands. Moran noted, correctly, that the tattoos Trump was referring to were literally photoshopped.
Trump responded with his best mob boss impersonation.
“Terry, they’re giving you the big break of a lifetime…. You’re not being very nice.”
Moran, to his credit, was not cowed, either in person or later when he wrote the truth about Trump and Miller and hate. ABC, on the other hand, couldn’t sink to its belly fast enough.
Bothsidesism run amok
Many analysts have criticized US journalism’s addiction to “bothsidesism” — the idea that the role of the media is to repeat quotes from Republicans and from Democrats without weighing in on whether one or the other is actually true.
University of Toronto professor Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively about authoritarianism and fascism, argues that bothsidesism is “suicide for democracy.” In becoming stenographers rather than reporters, journalists effectively legitimize MAGA lies, hate, and fascism as just one reasonable side of a debate in which all partisans are equally credible.
University of Melbourne journalism professor Denis Muller argues that bothsidesism and a naïve objectivity are flawed results of the “noble aim” of separating opinion and fact. News organizations after World War II believed (as they still do) that they could encourage public trust by reporting without any apparent bias or commentary.
Muller is no doubt correct that some media leaders are true believers in bothsidesism, objectivity, and the mystical power of refusing to call a fascist a fascist. But ABC’s multiple capitulations to do not suggest a news organization eager to avoid an appearance of bias. ABC, after all, isn’t worried that the public might be put off when it lets Trump dictate what it can put on air and what its reporters can say on their own social media accounts. How unbiased can the network be when it is willing and eager to demonstrate subservience to Trump?
In this context, it seems clear that “impartiality” isn’t a noble but misguided effort to inform the public. Instead, for ABC it has become an excuse to lie and withhold the truth from its viewers, because the truth would offend those in power.
Stephen Miller and Trump are hateful bigots. Independent journalists can still say that. Journalists at ABC can’t, because the president of the United States gets a veto over their coverage. That’s not democracy and it’s not a free press. It’s fascism.
That’s it for today
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Miller's own family has provided evidence of what you say for several years. There is a great deal of information readily available that describes his early development and his increasingly deteriorating separation from reality. He seems not to be a part of this world. His associations with largely failed organizations are also well documented.
The cowardice/spinelessness of republicans, the mainstream media, select law firms, select business moguls, etc. is beyond distressing. As for Steven Miller. Terry Moran was right and it is pathetic that ABC suspended him. Sad how only Trump and his team are allowed Free Speech. And also interesting about Stephen Miller and his animosity towards non-white immigrants....I believe his wife is a non-white immigrant.