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When one thinks of the ABC News of yesteryear, the names that first come to mind are David Brinkley, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, and Peter Jennings. All highly credible and professional. And if they held any political bias, the viewers never knew it.
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Today, it’s become the opposite of everything journalism used to be: conflicts of interest at the top, a hopelessly activist batch of anchors and reporters, and a reputation in the toilet.
Quite the contrast.
To begin, ABC News is run by Dana Walden. Who is she? Only the close friend of 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Harris, speaking at a fundraiser in Walden’s home in 2022, said, “In many ways, Dana and Matt are responsible for my marriage.”
According to Federal Election Commission data, Walden also donated on nearly a dozen occasions to various Harris political campaigns through the years. In 2023, she also donated $20,000 to then-President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.
Fortunately, when Disney was looking for a new CEO to replace Bob Iger, Walden’s chances were reportedly dashed due to her friendship with Harris.
Recent ABC interviews with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani show that the problem extends well beyond Walden’s political activity.
Chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl conducted both of these sit-downs, and the only proper description is that each was the rhetorical equivalent of a hot-stone massage.
With Ocasio-Cortez, Karl allowed a new Democratic talking point to be born without anything resembling a challenge. The congresswoman laughed off her past positions, and those of her Democratic Party, as “Woke 1” and “crazy.” Karl, after laughing along with his guest, didn’t bother to do Journalism 101 in ticking off each of the radical positions Ocasio-Cortez has taken in the past. He could have asked a series of simple yes or no questions, such as:
Defunding the police? Slashing the military budget? Imposing a 70% marginal tax rate? Spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on the “Green New Deal”? Ending private health insurance? Offering citizenship to millions who entered the United States illegally? Expanding the Supreme Court?
Only on defunding the police did Karl decide to broach anything remotely uncomfortable for Ocasio-Cortez. And when he did, he gave her an out by allowing her to respond by claiming: “During the lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”
There was no follow-up from Karl on why things were different around crime during the lockdown, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter riots that caused billions of dollars in damage. But during the interview, according to the ABC transcript, Karl did respond “yes” eight times in agreement with Ocasio-Cortez’s answers.
As for the Mamdani interview, he allowed the socialist mayor to claim that he was providing free childcare and had successfully brought down the rent through rent freezes.
“We’ve delivered free childcare for 2-year-olds for the first time in New York City history,” Mamdani said with a smile. “We’ve delivered tens of millions of dollars back to tenants who were taken advantage of by bad landlords.”
Here’s a fact: Free childcare is not available in New York for 2-year-olds as of today. And there’s a catch: Only 2,000 families in a city of 8 million people are eligible for “free” childcare when it is offered, which will be subsidized by taxpayers.
Here’s another fact: Tens of millions of dollars have not gone back to tenants. On the contrary, New York has seen rents skyrocket in 2026 since Mamdani’s gambit, and they now sit at their highest in city history. In Manhattan alone, the average monthly cost of an apartment is currently $6,690.
Any fact-check from Karl? Nope.
Finally, there’s this week’s revelation by former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran that the network neutered a big story it had in early 2021 about the possibility of a lab leak that led to the outbreak of COVID-19. But according to Moran, ABC bosses decided to alter the exclusive at the behest of Anthony Fauci, who had placed his entire reputation on his insistence that the leak came from a rogue bat in a wet market.
Here you have one of the big stories of the decade, the origin of COVID-19, and ABC allegedly ran to Fauci’s side instead of publishing the bombshell.
Moran would go on to say that the network is a “liberal institution” with no ideological diversity. But in the ultimate insult, the same man who wrote in a late-night rant last year that Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, was a “world-class hater” and that hate was “his spiritual nourishment,” had the audacity to say his Trump coverage was always impartial and fair.
You can’t make this stuff up.
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ABC News might as well be MSABC at this point. Once a beacon of journalism with a deep bench of true anchors and reporters, the network is nothing more than a left-wing blog with fancy studios and Disney money.
And until the culture changes, starting with the top, nothing will change.
