Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran says network executives rejected his attempt to examine concerns about then-President Joe Biden’s age and health months before Biden’s June 2024 debate performance intensified public scrutiny.

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.

Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran says network executives stopped him from pursuing a story examining then-President Joe Biden’s health and age in late 2023 or early 2024, despite Moran arguing internally that the subject was a legitimate matter of public interest.

Moran described the episode Sunday during an appearance on “The Daily Beast Podcast”, saying his concerns grew after observing Biden while covering a presidential trip to Japan in 2023.

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“In late 2023, early 2024, you know, it was pretty clear that Biden was fading rather quickly,” Moran said.

“I had actually traveled with him to Japan in the spring of 2023 and kind of eyeballed him there, and I thought, OK, he’s still functioning, but man, he’s frail. He looked like he’d blow away in a stiff wind,” Moran said.

Those descriptions reflect Moran’s personal observations rather than a medical diagnosis. Moran himself emphasized during the interview that he was not attempting to diagnose Biden. Mediaite reported Monday that ABC News did not immediately respond to its request for comment about Moran’s allegation that the proposed story was rejected.

Moran said he nevertheless believed the subject warranted reporting because voters were preparing to decide whether Biden, who would have been 86 at the end of a second term, should receive another four years in office.

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

Moran said he made his case to ABC editors in writing.

“I wrote an email to everybody as gently, and as respectfully as I could — I think I still have it. It was like, ‘This is a legit issue for Americans to be interested in,” Moran said.

“‘I’m not a doctor. I’m not diagnosing. But we all know what we know when we see people fading,” he continued.

“‘We all have had grandparents. We’re all getting old ourselves. So there’s no doubt about it: This is a legitimate concern for the voters of America,'” Moran said.

According to Moran, the response from network management was that Biden’s health was “the medical unit’s business, not yours.”

Moran’s account is his description of an internal editorial decision at ABC. No independent documentation of the email or the discussions he described has been made public in the reporting reviewed for this article.

The episode predates the June 27, 2024, presidential debate between Biden and Donald Trump that transformed questions about Biden’s age and performance into a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Biden delivered halting answers during the debate and struggled at several points to complete his responses. The performance prompted public concern among Democratic elected officials, donors and allies and eventually produced calls within his own party for him to reconsider his candidacy. Biden initially insisted he would remain in the race before announcing July 21, 2024, that he was ending his reelection campaign and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Moran had publicly discussed Biden’s age more than a year before the debate.

During an April 23, 2023, appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Moran said, “My own sense is that most Americans don’t want to vote for an 81-year-old running for president.”

The fuller exchange also showed that Moran raised concerns about the ages of both Biden and Trump, saying many voters wanted to see political leadership move to a younger generation. ABC’s own transcript records Moran saying voters did not particularly want either an 81-year-old Biden or a 77-year-old Trump running for president.

Moran’s latest comments therefore add a new allegation about what happened inside the network after he had already raised the age issue publicly.

He said he wanted to move beyond general discussion of Biden’s age and pursue a dedicated story based on what he had observed while traveling with the president, but ABC managers rejected his proposal.

The network’s coverage of Biden’s age before the 2024 debate has become part of a larger debate within the news industry over whether journalists sufficiently scrutinized the president’s condition and capacity during his final years in office.

Moran worked for ABC News from 1997 until 2025, serving in positions including chief White House correspondent, chief foreign correspondent, Supreme Court correspondent and co-anchor of “Nightline.”

His relationship with the network ended in June 2025 after he posted personal criticism of Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on social media.

ABC initially suspended Moran and subsequently announced it would not renew his contract, saying his post represented “a clear violation of ABC News policies.” The network said its journalists were expected to meet standards of “objectivity, fairness and professionalism.”

Moran had written that Miller was “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” and called him a “world-class hater.” He also directed harsh criticism at Trump.

During his latest Daily Beast interview, Moran again offered personal assessments of Trump, saying the president was “certainly in decline” and describing him as “a megalomaniac” with “a diseased mind.”

Those statements were Moran’s opinions and not medical findings. In the same interview, Moran acknowledged the difficulty of diagnosing a public figure from a distance and at one point explicitly said he was using terms concerning Trump’s behavior “not in the medical sense.”

Moran’s criticism of his former employer has also expanded beyond its handling of Biden.

In August, he alleged that ABC substantially changed a 2021 “Nightline” report he had prepared about the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory after the script went through internal review and, according to what Moran said he was told, was shown to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Moran said the original report presented the laboratory-origin theory without claiming to have determined the source of the pandemic, but that substantial material was removed before broadcast. He characterized that episode as the strongest example during his ABC career of what he considered editorial censorship. ABC’s decisions in that episode were described by Moran; his allegations do not by themselves establish that Fauci directed the changes.

His newer account concerning Biden focuses on a different stage of the editorial process: a story he says never advanced because executives told him the subject belonged with ABC’s medical unit.

The timing is significant because Moran says he made the proposal in late 2023 or early 2024, several months before Biden’s debate performance triggered widespread examination of his age and ability to continue campaigning.

Biden was 81 during the 2024 campaign and had long faced polling showing that voters considered his age an issue. The June debate, however, moved those concerns from a recurring campaign question into an immediate crisis for his candidacy. He withdrew less than a month later.

Moran now argues that the subject warranted more aggressive journalistic examination well before that moment.

Whether ABC should have approved the specific story Moran proposed remains an editorial judgment, and the network has not publicly provided its version of the internal exchange he described.

His allegation nevertheless adds to the continuing examination of how major news organizations approached questions about Biden’s age and health before the 2024 presidential campaign was upended by his debate performance and subsequent withdrawal.

Original article