Questions about Joe Biden's age and fitness intensified during his presidency as he increasingly displayed a slower gait, difficulty with stairs, a softer voice and occasional public lapses. Those concerns reached a crescendo in 2024 after Special Counsel Robert Hur described memory problems in his classified-documents interview and when Biden delivered a halting performance during his June presidential debate with Donald Trump.
Long before that, Terry Moran (pictured left) says ABC killed his story detailing Biden's declining health.
Though he is not a doctor, Moran recently told The Daily Beast podcast that it is not difficult to identify when an elderly person starts to go downhill.
"It was pretty clear that Biden was fading rather quickly," he said.
When he traveled with Biden to Japan in the spring of 2023, Moran recalls thinking, "He's still functioning but, man, he's frail."
"He looked like he'd blow away in a stiff wind," Moran told the podcast.
"I tried to do the story of Biden's health before anybody else did in network, and I got shut down very hard," the longtime reporter, who recently launched his own independent journalism venture, Real Patriotism, told the podcast.
"I wrote an email to everybody as gently and as respectfully as I could, [saying,] 'This is a legitimate concern for the voters of America," he recalled. "And [they] said, 'This is the medical unit's business. It's not yours.'"
Moran said he even urged Hunter Biden to advise his dad to retire, but to no avail.
At the time, Biden's campaign was preparing for the ailing president to seek a second term. That was months before the ill-fated Biden-Trump presidential debate spelled the end of his political career.
Curtis Houck, of Media Research Center's NewsBusters, watched the liberal media turn a blind eye to Biden's fading health. He says the fact that Moran is speaking out now, when ABC is protesting the removal of some colleagues from the White House press pool, is telling.
"That is not the kind of story that you want percolating, especially as other news organizations are fighting to restore press access to the White House," Houck says.
Additionally, ABC is in a lawsuit of its own with the Federal Communications Commission over charges that its bias disqualifies if from using the public airwaves.
"It leads me to believe that ABC News may not exactly be working in the interests of the people," Houck says, though that is what lot of these networks have insisted since their press credentials were revoked last week.
A federal court has ordered President Trump to reverse his ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, but reporters have still been denied access.
