Media Scrutinized for “Insane” Reporting on Iran Bombing Assessment
Political analyst Mark Halperin on Thursday criticized the media for using an early intelligence assessment of the damage America’s Saturday bombings inflicted on Iran’s nuclear program to portray President Donald Trump as a liar.
Trump said on Saturday that the bombings “totally obliterated” Iran’s crucial nuclear sites, but CNN and The New York Times published reports, based on an intelligence report, finding that the attack may have only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months. Halperin, on “The Morning Meeting,” said Trump was exaggerating the destruction, but the news outlets’ reports were attempts to downplay the effectiveness of the strikes — despite the lack of certainty of the intelligence assessment.
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“I thought I understood how the media works, but apparently I don’t. We are today where we were yesterday. The president continues to overstate the case,” Halperin said. “The people around him, like the Secretary of State and his spokesperson and the Secretary of Defense [Pete Hegseth], pretend attitudinally and stylistically and tonally that they’re agreeing with the president, but they’re not actually going as far as the president in most cases in qualifying the damage done to the Iranian nuclear program.”
“And then the media is just — it’s insane. Because Pete Hegseth is correct. They put out a fragment of a preliminary report and they framed it as if the president was lying. It’s insane what they did,” he continued. “The fragment of a preliminary report by one part of the intelligence community should not have been cast, as CNN and The New York Times did, as some definitive judgment on whether it worked or not, or how effective it was. It’s insane. And it opens the door to let the Secretary of Defense and the president have the debate about fake news.”
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Both CNN and The New York Times noted in their pieces that the intelligence assessment contradicted Trump’s assertions.
“[T]he early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes ‘completely and totally obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities,” CNN wrote.
“The initial damage assessment suggests that President Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear facilities were ‘obliterated’ was overstated,” the NYT wrote.
Both CNN and the NYT used unnamed sources for their reports.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Iranian government all contradicted CNN’s article on the leaked preliminary DIA damage report, generally asserting that the strikes caused substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear program.
The DIA later described its assessment as “low confidence.”
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Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly criticized the use of anonymous sources in CNN’s report on “CUOMO” Wednesday. CNN was first to report on the intelligence assessment.
“CNN used four anonymous sources to try to diminish the bombing raid. It’s what they do. But even worse was the news outlets that picked it up as fact. So anonymous sources are easy. You can get anybody to say anything. But when I read the article, I said, ‘how do these anonymous sources know?’ There’s nobody on the ground there,” O’Reilly said. “There’s nobody who went under the mountain to see. The Iranians can’t even do that because the mountain may collapse on them. There’s absolutely no primary source reporting on the damage that the American planes caused. None.”
“It’s absurd. No competent journalistic editor would have printed that article, but since CNN is in business to make Trump look bad, as you said, every moment of every day, they throw it out there,” he added.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
