‘I would consider myself a socialist…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a sadly ironic twist of fate, David Wright, a senior ABC News correspondent, will be reassigned from his plum post for the simple sin of telling the truth about how his news organization and others in the mainstream press systematically lie.
“I feel terrible about it,” Wright said in an undercover video released Wednesday by Project Veritas. “I feel that the truth suffers, the voters are poorly informed, and people also have the opportunity to tune into whatever they want to hear.”
Wright acknowledged his own far-left politics likely tainted his political coverage.
“I would consider myself a socialist—like, I think there should be national health insurance,” he said.
“I’m totally fine with reining in corporations,” he continued. “I think there are too many billionaires, and I think there’s a wealth gap—that’s a problem.”
Unfortunately, one of those corporations also signs his paycheck.
Wright complained that the media conglomerations that own the major networks seek to unduly censor their news arms in order to avoid negative headlines or scandals, as well as to pitch their own products.
“And so, it’s like there’s no upside, or our bosses don’t see an upside in doing the job we’re supposed to do, which is to speak truth to power and hold people accountable,” he said.
One example—itself the subject of a recent Project Veritas exposé—is the network’s avoidance of coverage that might have dug too deep into the sex scandal involving pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, prior to his death in prison, had been linked to an array of wealth power-brokers—most notably former President Bill Clinton, current President Donald Trump and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Wright also noted that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is a notorious cross-promoter in its entertainment products, which oftentimes bleed into the news realm also.
The company owns brands or production rights not only for its own Disney characters, but also for Marvel and Star Wars to name just a few of its lucrative franchise.
“You can’t watch ‘Good Morning America’ without a Disney princess or a Marvel Avenger appearing,” Wright said.
It is equally notorious for protecting its copyrights with aggressive litigation while shamelessly pitching them on stable of platforms for music recording, film (including Touchstone Pictures), and networks including ABC, ESPN, FX and National Geographic.
On the eve of Project Veritas’s release, Wright found that he, too, fell victim to Disney’s cardinal rule to never badmouth or tarnish the brand.
“Any action that damages our reputation for fairness and impartiality or gives the appearance of compromising it harms ABC News and the individuals involved,” a representative of the company told Project Veritas.
“David Wright has been suspended, and to avoid any possible appearance of bias, he will be reassigned away from political coverage when he returns,” said the statement.
Granted, Wright’s rant, to a Project Veritas journalist who identified as a documentary filmmaker and recorded the veteran correspondent and a producer without their knowledge, offered plenty of candidate bias about his own hostile views against President Donald Trump.
Wright seemed to have a meta-awareness of how Trump, in his mind, manipulates the media, while showing little self-awareness of his own role in the toxic relationship between the president and the mainstream press.
“We’re not disciplined enough to cut him off, and we second-guess ourselves because we’re sensitive to the accusation that we’re in the tank for the Democrats,” Write acknowledged.
“And so that enables them—and so we enable them—and every time we take the bait on it, and that’s what he wants,” he continued. “It’s totally and abusive relationship. He’s the nightmare spouse that you can’t win an argument with.”
When pressed as to why he disliked Trump, Wright—who has appeared on “World News Tonight,” “Nightline” and “Good Morning America” among other ABC programs—admitted that he had a personal animus toward the president, “cause he’s a d**k.”
Wright admitted that factors within the media business model created an established formula for covering the president that included “the outrage of the day, the investigation, and of the palace intrigue of who’s backstabbing whom.”
However, it left little room for covering Trump’s positive achievements or any substantive critical analysis of his policies.
Wright’s Chicago-based producer, Andy Fies, criticized echo-chamber elites in liberal bastions like Manhattan for having a distorted view of the world, which led to shock when confronted with political realities.
“I mean the people in New York … are constantly, I think, fascinated by, ‘How can people like Donald Trump? How can people understand?’ Fies said. “You know, well f**k! Cross the Hudson now and then, and come out and spend some time, and you’ll hear why!”
But Wright himself saw little interest in venturing beyond the Big Apple’s group-think.
While debating with his ABC colleagues whether Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders had gotten a ‘free pass’ from the press despite both his personal and policy flaws, Wright signaled that he was all in on the radical, socialist movement, if not the Vermont senator himself.
“Yeah, I think, you now, Bernie is very old and I think he doesn’t want to admit that,” Wright said.
“Bernie is also I think he—like he believes in the movement that he started,” Wright continued. “And, he did, really—he was John the Baptist, you know, but he doesn’t need to be a messiah.”