A recently axed ABC News host, Terry Moran, says his former employer is lying about his termination, having reneged on an “oral agreement” to renew his contract after he posted an inflammatory, late-night tweet about a top White House adviser, Stephen Miller. 

Mr. Moran, 65, was dumped by Disney-owned ABC News after he posted on X about Mr. Miller,  calling him a “world-class hater.” The post added that people can “see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” The post also said President Trump is a “world-class hater” but that his “hatred is only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification.”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called Mr. Moran’s post “unhinged and unacceptable,” and said White House officials asked ABC News how it planned to hold the journalist accountable. Two days later, ABC News said Mr. Moran’s contract was about to expire and, due to his post, “We have made the decision not to renew.”

However, Mr. Moran says the network’s statement about the status of his contract is “incorrect.” In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Moran said ABC News was “bailing” on an “oral agreement” to renew his contract.

“We had a deal,” Mr. Moran told the Times. 

ABC News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment. 

Television news stars are all signed to multi-year contracts by the networks — usually three-year deals — which guarantee them employment and compensation unless they engage in “actionable” misconduct. The expiry of a contract gives a network the opportunity not to renew, to terminate the employee, without cause. With the legacy TV news business in rapid decline, many high-paid correspondents and anchors are being let go at the ends of their contracts or asked to take steep pay cuts. News stars recently cut loose include NBC’s Chuck Todd, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, and CNN’s Jim Acosta.

Oral agreements between an on-air talent’s agent or attorney and a business affairs executive at a network are considered binding agreements that precede the formality of a written contract. But the convention relies on an honor code between entertainment attorneys and network executives, who often have been working together for years. 

Mr. Moran, who worked at ABC News for 28 years, was not one of the network’s main hosts, but he had a long and distinguished career at ABC, including as the chief White House correspondent and an anchor at “Nightline,” and was the last survivor of the murderer’s row of correspondents who reported for ABC News in heyday of Peter Jennings, before ABC News spiraled into decline. Mr. Moran recently interviewed President Trump, who quipped that he had “never heard” of the journalist, which is unlikely considering Mr. Trump’s media consumption habits and Mr. Moran’s decades on a major broadcast network. 

Mr. Moran’s tweet had terrible timing. ABC News recently paid Mr. Trump $16 million to settle his defamation lawsuit after host George Stephanopoulos repeatedly and falsely stated he was “found liable for rape.” The network later expressed its “regret” for the comment. 

The decision to settle raised some eyebrows among media observers, who suggested that ABC News could have easily won in court. A veteran media reporter, Matthew Belloni, said that Mr. Trump’s attorneys would have a hard time showing Mr. Stephanopoulos’s comment crossed the line of “actual malice,” the high bar required in defamation cases involving public figures. 

Mr. Belloni suggested the decision to settle was an effort by ABC News and the chief executive, Bob Iger, of its parent company, Disney, to extend an olive branch to the administration and avoid a potentially embarrassing discovery process in a defamation trial. 

In another step seemingly aimed at improving relations with the White House, the Daily Beast reported in May that the president of ABC News, Almin Karamehmedovic, and Mr. Iger suggested to an aggressively anti-Trump ABC News talk show, “The View,” that it should tone down its criticism of the president. 

Despite granting an interview with ABC News and the network’s reported attempts to mend relationships with the new administration, the president remains disgruntled at ABC News, with an eye toward future litigation and regulatory action.

Indeed, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, said he is investigating Disney and ABC for allegedly “promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

Mr. Trump also recently lashed out at ABC News over its coverage of his decision to take possession of a luxury jet from Qatar — valued at roughly $400 million — to serve as a temporary presidential plane, and seemed to threaten he might sue the network. 

“Why doesn’t Chairman Bob Iger do something about ABC Fake News,” Mr. Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Now I see they are at it again, and I again give these SleazeBags fair warning. The wonderful country of Qatar, after agreeing to invest more than 1.4 Trillion Dollars in the United States of America, deserves much better than Misleading (Fake!) News. Everyone, including their lawyers, has been told that ABC must not say that Qatar is giving ME a FREE Boeing 747 Airplane, because they are not.”

The president said Qatar is “donating the plane to the United States Air Force/ Defense Department, AND NOT TO ME.”

Attorney General Bondi has said the deal would not violate the Constitution if the transfer of the plane is not conditioned on any official act in exchange, if it is transferred to the American government instead of to Mr. Trump, and if it is transferred to the 47th president’s library and not to him directly for his personal use after he leaves office. 

Despite Disney’s bigger-picture efforts to tone down ABC News’s anti-Trump tenor, the news division’s on-air stars remain fiercely anti-Trump, with news personalities such as White House reporter Rachel Scott bullying Mr. Trump to his face when, as a candidate, he appeared at an NABJ conference; and White House correspondent Jonathan Karl writing anti-Trump books called “Betrayal” and “Retribution.”

News personalities David Muir and Linsey Davis were widely denounced for skewing the one 2024 debate between Mr. Trump and Vice President Harris sharply in her favor — fact-checking Mr. Trump aggressively and asking lines of questioning favorable to Ms. Harris. And Mr. Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton operative, remains firmly in place and is believed to earn $25 million a year.

Mr. Moran, however, did not have the leverage of ABC News’s new lineup of news stars. In the midst of the apparently still contentious relationship with the Trump administration, Mr. Moran — who reportedly earned between $600,000 and $900,000 a year — and his post likely caused some heartburn for Mr. Iger and other ABC News executives. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. Iger signed off on Mr. Moran’s termination.

In the fallout from his tweet, and before he was terminated, Mr. Moran’s colleagues at ABC News vented to the New York Post, with some saying they were “pissed” at him and suggesting that he should be fired to save the network money as it is desperately seeking to cut costs. In March, ABC announced it was laying off roughly 200 employees as it, like other broadcast and cable networks, is facing growing financial uncertainty. 

“Everything that Trump has said about the media — that they are haters and they are biased — Moran proved it true,” one insider told the Post. 

Another said that firing the ex-host would “save the network a lot of money, and would demonstrate to the White House that ABC takes the issue seriously.”

Despite the reported frustration his post caused at his former network, Mr. Moran is defending the decision to make the midnight post — which he said was not a drunken decision, as some have speculated due to the time of the post.

“It wasn’t a drunk tweet,” Mr. Moran told the Times, saying the idea for it came during a “normal family night.”

“I was thinking about our country, and what’s happening, and just turning it over in my mind,” he said.

The verbal agreement Mr. Moran claims he had with ABC News likely involved a steep pay cut, which may have colored his thinking before he sent the tweet.

In his post-ABC News life, Mr. Moran — like Mr. Todd, Ms. Reid and Mr. Acosta — has launched his own anti-Trump Substack. He told the Times he is still negotiating his exit from ABC News.