Legacy media are failing to deliver honest reporting on the war with Iran.
“President Trump faces a stark choice — stay in the battle to achieve the dauntingly ambitious goals he has set, or try to extract himself from an expanding and intensifying conflict that is generating damaging military, diplomatic and economic shock waves,” says the New York Times. The Associated Press reports that “President Donald Trump increasingly has been knocked on his political heels” since the war started, while CNN tells us that escorting commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz “could go disastrously wrong.”
Instead of disinterested coverage, legacy media provide analysis and editorials masquerading as reporting. They should be much more evenhanded in their approach.
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A telling example came from Margaret Brennan, who hosts CBS News’s Face the Nation. She had probing questions for Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter on her show on March 8. But one week later, Brennan evinced less skepticism in her interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, whom she didn’t even challenge on the tens of thousands of protesters the regime slaughtered earlier this year. That she was tougher on officials from democracies than the chief diplomat of perhaps the world’s vilest regime said it all.
It is one thing for journalists to observe the war’s risks and costs. It is another thing for them to frame it as a failure, absent evidence. What about the fact that the United States and Israel have eliminated Iran’s political leadership, sunk its navy, and degraded its nuclear, ballistic missile, and drone capabilities?
One can’t escape the conclusion that legacy media want America to lose this war.
Contrast this with the media’s attitude when the U.S. went into Afghanistan and Iraq a generation ago. Coverage was initially favorable and focused on the fulfillment of American military objectives. It soured only after the wars turned into protracted campaigns of nation-building. This time around, legacy media are critical right off the bat.
It’s no mystery why. Hostility to the current commander in chief is ubiquitous in newsrooms. President Donald Trump, whose media coverage during the first 100 days of his second term was 92% negative, can do little right in the eyes of journalists. If he authorized the strikes on Iran, then they must be bad. The war in Iran is another opportunity for legacy media to demonstrate its anti-Trump bona fides.
Yet, partisanship isn’t the only driver of the coverage. Another is falling patriotism. Journalists, just 3.4% of whom are Republicans, are aligned with a Democratic Party that is increasingly lukewarm about the U.S. A meager 36% of Democrats are extremely or very proud to be an American, the lowest figure ever recorded.
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The decline isn’t due to politics alone. In 2008, when the Republican George W. Bush was president, 76% of Democrats were extremely or very proud to be an American. What happened in the interim was a woke revolution on the American Left. Liberal journalists today see little to admire in the U.S. and much to criticize. When it comes to foreign policy, they see hardly any difference between democratic America and theocratic Iran. In their minds, the U.S. doesn’t deserve to win.
Coverage of this war is another example of why so few Americans trust legacy media. On this story and many others, journalists have lost the plot.
Daniel J. Samet is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.