Another part of the Media Research Center’s Trump Regime Media duty in defending President Trump’s missile strikes on Iran was waging war against a CNN reporter who showed they were likely not as effective as Trump and the MRC insisted they were. Alex Christy grumbled in a June 25 post:
On Tuesday, CNN published an article of debatable accuracy alleging that Saturday’s B-2 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were not as successful as President Trump and other administration officials have claimed. However, CBS’s Stephen Colbert wasn’t interested in the nuances of underground nuclear facility bomb damage assessment on The Late Show because if he was, he would not have been able to do his MC Hammer dance in response.
A sarcastic Colbert teed up a clip of Trump by declaring, “Whether or not the ceasefire holds, one thing we know for certain is that our military operation was worth it, because hostilities have ceased, there were no American casualties, and the president told us this.”
In the clip, Trump claimed, “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
[…]As for the CNN/DIA story, the original article did not mention the assessment was of “low confidence.” The current version does. Second, the allegedly collaborating article from The New York Times reported, “The strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings, the officials said the early findings concluded,” but we know that the Iranians themselves sealed the tunnels prior to Saturday’s raids. Third, while CNN and the DIA claim that Iran’s program has been set back “a few months,” the IDF puts it at “years,” so at best there are conflicting opinions.
Fourth, as for centrifuges, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency has guessed, “Given the explosive payload utilized and the extreme vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges, very significant damage is expected to have occurred.” That assessment is similar to other experts, who claimed, “Overall, Israel’s and U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program. It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”
Curtis Houck baselessly framed the CNN story as a “Deep State leak”:
On Wednesday during his press conference on the sidelines of the annual NATO summit, President Trump tag-teamed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to obliterate the new Deep State leak to CNN’s Natasha Bertrand — who penned the infamous article declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop to be Russian disinformation — that claimed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has deemed the weekend U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities a failure.
Trump first called out “Fake News CNN” during his opening remarks (along with MSNBC and The New York Times):
[…]Reminding those watching of his accessibility as President (in comparison to the last one), Trump called on CNN host and chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and took a dig at her network by saying she “should really say how great our soldiers and our warriors are.”
[…]Hegseth then took a turn and lambasted the Deep State leak as “fake news” and acknowledged the “the instinct, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times” after this heroic mission was “try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country” and not “car[ing] what the troops think.”
Houck cited no evidence from Trump or Hegseth that the CNN report was, in fact, “fake news.”
P.J. Gladnick cranked out a personal attack on Bertrand:
CNN is aerobically back-patting national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand for her “incredible reporting” suggesting the Trump team wasn’t very successful in it’s bunker-busting of Iran’s nuclear facilities. She always finds anonymous sources inside the intelligence community who assist in the anti-Trump spin.
They don’t mention her previous “incredible” intel disinformation. Bertrand was promoted from Politico to CNN after she “fortified” the 2020 election against Donald Trump by hyping the disinformation campaign by 51 intelligence officials who claimed that the highly damaging (to the Joe Biden campaign) information on Hunter Biden’s laptop about the family influence-pedding business was actually the result of Russian disinformation.
Gladnick offered no evidence to dispute the accuracy of Bertrand’s story. Instead, he whined:
You have to wonder if members of the Defense Intelligence Agency are so clueless as to risk their careers and reputations (and desire to stay out of prison) as to leak top secret information to someone who has been publicly discredited for perpetrating fake news supposedly based on intelligence sources.
Jorge Bonilla huffed:
The leaked and Natasha Bertrand-laundered Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz, Esfahan and Fordow, quickly made it to the top of the legacy media evening news. Its promise of a minor setback for Iran’s nuclear program, as opposed to total destruction, was uniformly parroted, touted and highlighted by the Trump-deranged media.
Natasha Bertrand is, of course, the same reporter that laundered two of the defining political hoaxes of our time: the Russia Hoax, and the Hunter Biden laptop (as Russian disinformation) hoax. In both instances, leaked intelligence that was coincidentally damaging to President Donald Trump magically found its way to Bertrand, and was dutifully echoed by the rest of the media.
[…]All three networks, each in their own way, parroted a low-probability intel leak, evidently timed to cast doubt on the success of Operation Midnight Hammer and ahead of a related Senate hearing. We won’t be fooled again.
Tim Graham toed the Trump Regime Media line in his podcast, the fifth MRC item published on June 25 bashing the CNN report:
The current dominant spin about President Trump’s bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities comes from anonymous intelligence sources. They are guessing that the Iranian nuclear program has only been set back about three months. Once again, reporters like CNN’s Natasha Bertrand exploit shadowy sources for an anti-Trump spin, pretending all the way that there’s no politics being played.
All the “mainstream” media outlets that channeled Bertrand’s version of events weren’t going to mention that five years ago, Bertrand also marshaled high-profile intelligence professionals to claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. That turned out to be the American disinformation.
The intelligence leaker here for Bertrand and for others could have been a major pusher of Trump-colludes-with-Putin leaks, but they get portrayed as authoritative and objective by their anonymity. No one can evaluate their political activity or contributions or partisan associations. We’re all kept in the dark.
Graham didn’t mention that the MRC embraces anonymous sources when they forward conservatively correct narratives, making his complaint decidedly hypocritical.