As soon as the U.S. airstrikes hit Iran’s key nuclear sites late Sunday, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN went wall to wall, bringing in the network’s big guns to report the monumental news that President Donald Trump had pulled the trigger.
The majority of the coverage fell into typical patterns of conservative Fox commentators and experts largely defending the president, with Life, Liberty & Levin host Mark Levin going so far as to say, “You can stand taller now, with your chest puffed out,” while calling for boots on the ground. Levin and Fox host Sean Hannity hailed the attacks as historic and heroic.
There wasn’t a lot of diversity of opinion on the network. Hosts marched in lockstep with the administration, cheering the strikes that included bunker-busting bombs to damage Iran’s Fordow site, buried deeply underground. At one point, however, Fox News played a soundbite of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) saying, “The president doesn’t have the right” to initiate strikes without consulting Congress and calling that “an impeachable offense.”
What ensued was not a debate about whether he was right, but a forum to attack Democrats — most of them — for expressing animosity toward the president’s actions.
Fox did cover the dissent by Rep.Thomas Massie (R-KY), who also argues that Congress should have been consulted. One Fox News commentator slammed him: Massie “doesn’t think 46 years of maiming citizens is enough” to attack Iran. Trump wrote on Truth Social that Massie is a “pathetic loser,” and a top Trump ally is helping to lead a super PAC to unseat him.
Fox’s Bret Baier interviewed Vice President JD Vance Monday on Special Report and pressed him on something that the president had just posted, saying Israel and Iran had just agreed to a cease-fire–which was news to the vice president.
Staunchly liberal MSNBC featured a parade of guests, from Democratic lawmakers to left-wing pundits, who mainly ripped the president’s military attacks.
When AOC said Trump “impulsively risked launching a war” and that “is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment,” NBC White House correspondent Peter Alexander played up her comments on MSNBC.
But there were exceptions to the onslaught of anti-Trump guests.
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, the onetime GOP congressman, defended Trump’s decision to target Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend, saying Hillary Clinton and others would have done the same thing.
“I’m not championing either side of this,” Scarborough said. “Although I ask you, how difficult would it have been for any president to not take that shot…I find it hard to believe that Bush 41, Bush 43, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you know, go down the list, any president would have felt compelled to take that strike.”
Scarborough, who has spent years attacking Trump despite a visit soon after the election to Mar-a-Lago, deserves kudos for his independence from liberal orthodoxy. It’s a stance not likely to please his viewers.
CNN, in many instances, attempted to play things more down the middle. Guests included both Republicans and Democrats who offered pro and con opinions about whether the strikes were justified. While CNN, a bit dull at times, surprised me by not turning itself into MSNBC Lite.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer spent many hours in the anchor chair. He interviewed Congressman Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, who said Trump was mocking the idea of consultation with Congress and had acted “unilaterally.”
Blitzer, who rarely shows emotion on the air, also interviewed Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He called the strikes “historic events” but also noted they were similar to previous military strikes under Democratic administrations. Issa also appeared on Fox.
And the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, a foreign affairs expert, forcefully declared that “The big winner is Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Meanwhile, some in the liberal media who love to ridicule Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the fiery congresswoman, praised her for insisting she was not being disloyal to Trump by saying that the U.S. airstrikes were wrong and could lead to a third world war.
But while the administration has insisted it only wants to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, television jumped all over this Truth Social post: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
Trump was in a celebratory mood Monday when he got Israel and Iran to agree to a cease-fire within 24 hours, something few would have thought possible. But by yesterday morning, after violations by both sides, Trump angrily told reporters near his helicopter that he was extremely unhappy with Israel’s substantial bombing of the Iranians after some fired by Tehran. He even declared that the two countries “don’t know what the f**k they are doing.” And he didn’t use asterisks.
Rather than just attacking the Mideast countries, he also unleashed a scathing attack on his favorite target, television news. He was riled up as he assailed CNN and MSNBC for their skeptical reporting about how much damage the bunker-busting bombs had done to Iran’s deeply underground nuclear facility.
“The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it. Only the Fake News would say anything different in order to try and demean, as much as possible — And even they say they were ‘pretty well destroyed!’ Working especially hard on this falsehood is Allison Cooper of Fake News CNN, Dumb Brian L. Roberts, Chairman of ‘Con’cast, Jonny Karl of ABC Fake News, and always, the Losers of, again, Concast’s NBC Fake News. It never ends with the sleazebags in the Media, and that’s why their Ratings are at an ALL TIME LOW — ZERO CREDIBILITY!”
NBC had broken in with live coverage before the Joint Chiefs chairman told reporters the Fodrow site had suffered “severe damage and destruction” but that it was too soon to say whether it retained some nuclear capability–not exactly backing Trump’s declaration that it had been “totally obliterated.”
So when Trump demands the two networks apologize to the brave B-2 fighter pilots who dropped bombs on Iran’s Fordow facility, his own Pentagon can’t confirm his claims.
While Trump is hoping his attacks will bring an elusive measure of peace between Israel and Iran, it’s clear his years-long attacks on the media –and anyone who disagrees with him — are a battle that will never end.
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