Terry Moran

Terry Moran is a co-anchor of ABC News’ “Nightline” and covers the Supreme Court for the network from his base in Washington, DC. At “Nightline,” Mr. Moran has led the program’s distinguished coverage of many of the major news stories over the past several years.

Mr. Moran has led Nightline’s coverage of the Obama administration and the extraordinary presidential campaign of 2008. He has conducted nine one-on-one interviews with Barack Obama, dating back to 2006, giving him a unique insight into this president. Among his groundbreaking interviews are an exclusive and wide-ranging conversation about race in America just after then-Sen. Obama’s major speech on the subject in Philadelphia in March of 2008; an exclusive interview in Baghdad with then-Sen. Obama in August, 2008; and a July 2009 interview in Florida with President Obama on health care, Afghanistan, and the power of prayer in the president’s life.

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Mr. Moran crisscrossed the country, interviewing and spending time covering the campaigns of Sen. John McCain, Sen. John Edwards, former Gov. Mitt Romney, former Gov. Mike Huckabee and Gov. Bill Richardson. He anchored the broadcast from Iowa, New Hampshire and other primary battlegrounds. And he continues to cover the political scene, from the “tea-party rallies” to debate over health care.

In March of 2009, Mr. Moran underwent DNA testing to discover whether he carried genetic markers associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which runs in his family. The resulting story was an emotional account of the toll the disease takes in America, and a powerful call to action.

Mr. Moran has reported extensively from overseas for “Nightline,” covering the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He has traveled to both war zones for the program.

In May of 2009, Mr. Moran reported from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on the raging drug violence that has brought the country to the brink of chaos. His interview with a confessed hit man in one of Mexico’s most notorious gangs exposed blatant corruption of US law enforcement officials in the multi-billion dollar cross-border drug-trafficking business.

In June of 2006, Mr. Moran traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for a week-long “Nightline” series on the American detention facility there and the controversies surrounding interrogation techniques, conditions and the legal status of the 200-plus men held there as “enemy combatants.” He was at Guantanamo Bay when the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling on the rights of the detainees, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and he reported on the case and its impact for all ABC News programs.

Among the major domestic news stories Mr. Moran has covered for “Nightline,” he led the program’s coverage for a week from Blacksburg, VA, covering the tragedy at Virginia Tech; he spent a week reporting on the California wildfires in the fall of 2007, hosting “Nightline’s” critically acclaimed one-hour special from the fire zone; he was on the scene in Los Angeles reporting on the huge immigration rallies there in May of 2006; and he has chronicled the continuing struggle of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. He was on the Gulf Coast when the storm slammed ashore in 2005, reporting for all ABC News programs.

Mr. Moran has interviewed a wide range of celebrities, musicians and authors, including Kanye West, Keira Knightley, Khaled Hosseini (author of “A Thousand Splendid Suns”), Natalie Portman, Francis Ford Coppola and Ryan Seacrest. Prior to co-anchoring “Nightline,” he was ABC’s Chief White House correspondent for six years, covering the administrations of President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In 2006, he was honored by the White House Correspondents Association with the Merriman Smith Award for excellence in presidential reporting on deadline. In 2007, he received the George Foster Peabody Award for his work reporting and anchoring the one-hour ABC News documentary, “Out of Control: AIDS in Black America.”

In 2004, Mr. Moran was named anchor of World News Tonight Sunday, a position he held until joining Nightline.

A key member of the ABC News team covering the events of September 11, 2001, Mr. Moran continued to report on all aspects of the war on terror while covering the Bush administration. He reported from the White House throughout the war with Iraq during the spring of 2003. In November of 2003, he traveled to Baghdad to report on the U.S.-led occupation and the violent insurgency against it.

Mr. Moran covered Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He traveled extensively, reporting on the primary battles between Gore and Senator Bill Bradley in Iowa, New Hampshire and on Super Tuesday. During the hard-fought general-election campaign, he logged thousands of miles with Vice President Gore and spent Election Day in Nashville, where he reported on the historic events that night. For the next 35 days, he covered the legal battle for the White House, and on the chaotic night the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Bush v. Gore, it was from listening to Mr. Moran’s clear explanation of the Court’s opinion that Vice President Gore himself learned he had lost the presidency.

In 1999 Mr. Moran traveled to the Balkans to cover the war in Kosovo and its troubled aftermath. From the refugee camps in Macedonia to the Roma (“gypsy”) neighborhoods of Pristina, he investigated war-crimes stories and reported on the human impact of the ethnic-cleansing campaigns launched by both Serbs and Kosovars.

Prior to covering politics and policy, Mr. Moran spent ten years covering law. From 1998-1999 he was the primary ABC News correspondent assigned to the U.S. Supreme Court. He filed stories on several major cases of the term, including Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, a case that raised the issue of schools’ liability for student-on-student sexual harassment. Other legal stories he has covered for ABC News include the murder trial of British au pair Louise Woodward in Cambridge, Mass.; the fourth trial of Dr. Jack Kevorkian; the trial of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski; the Microsoft anti-trust case; and the Portland, Oregon, trial of anti-abortion activists sued for contributing to a website that the jury found illegally threatened abortion providers. For “Nightline” -- among other stories – Mr. Moran covered the unique death-penalty case of Horace Kelly, a man who had gone insane on California’s death row and was then brought before a jury, which was asked if he should still be executed; the tragic rash of heroin-overdose deaths of teenagers in Plano, Texas; and the remarkable gathering of dozens of former death-row inmates freed when evidence of their innocence came to light. For this piece he was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award by the Death Penalty Information Center. He was also in Miami in the spring of 1999 when Elian Gonzalez was seized by federal agents and returned to his father, and he covered the protests and the civil disturbances in the city that followed the government’s action.

Prior to joining ABC News in 1997, Mr. Moran was a correspondent and anchor for Court TV. He received critical acclaim for his nightly coverage of the day’s events in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, and for his extensive reports during the trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez, when the Los Angeles brothers first faced charges for the shotgun murders of their parents. For Court TV, he also traveled to Bosnia and The Hague to cover the first international war-crimes trial since World War II—that of a Bosnian Serb named Dusko Tadic. In addition, he was Court TV’s correspondent for the Supreme Court confirmation debates over Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Before joining Court TV, he was a reporter and assistant managing editor for Legal Times.

Mr. Moran has written for several publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic Magazine, where he began his career in journalism.