White House labels ABC News a ‘Democrat spin operation masquerading as broadcast network’
WASHINGTON, DC: The White House under President Donald Trump on Wednesday, November 19, lashed out at ABC News, branding the media organization a “Democrat spin operation masquerading as a broadcast network.”
The press release claimed that ABC “News” is not journalism, but a network with a “longstanding commitment to hoaxes, character assassinations, and outright fiction targeting only one side of the political aisle.”
White House lists ABC News misreports
The White House detailed a series of incidents to support its claim that ABC “News” has a “long, rich tradition of peddling lies, conspiracies, and outright opinion thinly veiled as fact.”
The list of grievances begins with the 2017 suspension of investigative reporter Brian Ross for falsely reporting that President Trump had directed Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials before the 2016 election.
Additionally, in 2020, ABC suspended veteran correspondent David Wright after he was reportedly “caught identifying himself as a ‘socialist’ and admitting the network pushes an anti-Trump agenda and airs stories designed for profit, not news.”
The statement also highlighted George Stephanopoulos, whom it called a “longtime Democrat operative turned wannabe ‘journalist’, [who] failed to ask Joe Biden about his son Hunter’s infamous laptop or the swirling allegations of impropriety.”
More recently, in 2024, Stephanopoulos was reportedly accused of repeatedly lying about President Trump's legal cases, which resulted in the network agreeing to settle a lawsuit for $16 million with a “statement of regret.”
White House accuses ABC News of systemic bias in Trump coverage
The press release identified several areas where it said ABC News demonstrated clear editorial bias against the Trump administration.
In October 2024, the network was accused of erroneously “fact checking” President Trump at least five times during the presidential debate, while failing to call out his opponent a single time.
After the President’s 2024 election win, the administration said, “90% of the network’s coverage of his cabinet nominees was negative.”
In September, Stephanopoulos repeatedly — and falsely — insisted that people had somehow “died” because of the Trump Administration’s decision to shutter a bloated, wasteful bureaucratic agency.https://t.co/jYN9Bv2DY1
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) November 19, 2025
Examples of the alleged biased coverage in January included the network giving “27 times more coverage to President Trump’s pardons of January 6 defendants than of Biden's last-minute pardons to his corrupt family members” and editorializing in a “partisan way that President Trump’s personnel directives were ‘retribution.’”
The White House slammed ABC News for having “mischaracterized the Trump Administration’s effort to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the bloated federal bureaucracy as an attack on veterans” in February.
Further, in April, the network was accused of having “peddled the debunked lie that the Trump Administration was unilaterally deporting US citizen babies.”
White House accuses ABC News of distorting and sensationalizing events
The White House also focused on several instances where ABC News is alleged to have distorted or sensationalized events.
In June, ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran was accused of smearing White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as a “world-class hater” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” which the statement noted was “just one entry in a long series of Moran’s obvious liberal bias during his tenure.”
That same month, the network aired what it labeled a “violent Border Patrol detention”, but failed to mention that the detained illegal immigrant had been chasing federal agents with a weed whacker.
Furthermore, in June, in coverage critical of President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, ABC News “praised violent Los Angeles rioters for ‘self-policing’, as local businesses and property were being harmed.”
The press release stated that in July, ABC News “used its special coverage of the One Big Beautiful Bill signing ceremony to falsely claim the legislation would ‘mostly’ benefit ‘the wealthiest Americans’” and repeated the debunked claim that millions of Americans would “lose their healthcare.”
The network was also accused, in July, of downplaying the MS-13 gang, “whose motto is literally ‘kill, r**e, control’”, as a “clique,” and of refusing to cover “The Office of National Intelligence’s announcement of a landmark investigation into Obama-era politicization and manufacturing of intelligence assessments.”
