ABC news has suspended veteran correspondent David Wright, after he admitted to an undercover cameraman that “fake news abounds” at the network, and that ABC’s reporters “don’t give [Trump] credit for what things he does do.”
Wright’s suspension came after conservative watchdog group Project Veritas released video footage of Wright complaining about the network to an undercover cameraman.
“David Wright has been suspended, and to avoid any possible appearance of bias, he will be reassigned away from political coverage when he returns,” ABC News said in a statement released on Wednesday. The network actually suspended Wright on Tuesday, even before Project Veritas’ video aired.
In the surreptitiously recorded footage, Wright griped with his bosses for failing to cover Donald Trump’s presidency ethically. “We don’t hold him to account,” Wright said. “We also don’t give him credit for what things he does do.”
Wright, who described himself as “a socialist,” went on to call Trump “a d**k” and “the nightmare spouse you can’t win an argument with.”
Rather than covering Trump objectively though, Wright said that ABC is interested in “the outrage of the day, the investigation, and the palace intrigue of who’s backstabbing whom.”
The truth suffers, the voters are poorly informed, and our bosses don’t see an upside in doing the job that we’re supposed to do, which is to speak truth to power and hold people accountable.
Stories of anti-Trump bias within mainstream media organizations are ten a penny. Trump himself tweeted more than 600 times about the “fake news” media, Project Veritas has published similar videos about other networks, and a Harvard study found that 80 percent of Trump-related news reports are negative in tone.
Wright’s scathing depiction of ABC as a corporate “promotion center,” however, may have incensed higher-ups at the network. ABC is owned by Disney, and the reporter slammed the network for prioritizing profits for its owners over hard journalism.
“[ABC is] a profit center, a promotion center,” he said. “You can’t watch ‘Good Morning America’ without there being a Disney princess or Marvel Avenger appearing. It’s all self-promotion and promotion of the company. The commercial imperative is incompatible with news.”
“We’ve lost, at least in television, we’ve lost any sense of context and perspective and it’s just, the urgent moment, the horse race and the outrage from Trump,” Wright said. “We often talk about how it used to be better.”
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