The Media Research Center continued to rant about CNN’s report stating that President Trump’s military strike against Iran wasn’t as successful as he claimed with a June 26 post by intern Matthew Seck:
On Tuesday night, MSNBC’s The Briefing With Jen Psaki, regurgitated the same unreliable, CNN article that claimed the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities “only set them back by a few months.” Psaki even went as far as to say that Trump was always “about obfuscation and defiance being prioritized over facts.” Yes, Jen Psaki was the one who said this — the former obfuscator for President Biden and for Secretary of State John Kerry before that.
Psaki wanted to quibble over the word “obliterate” by elevating one assessment that was leaked to the press, while others remained classified:
[…]Instead of thanking our dedicated U.S. military personnel who carried out this extraordinary strike, Jen Psaki chose to run a smear segment on President Trump based off of “anonymous” reports from someone in the intelligence community. She quoted the NBC News article that claimed the initial assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that the U.S. airstrikes were not as effective as Trump said, while also citing this CNN article.
Keep in mind while reading this article that the “journalist,” Natasha Bertrand also wrote a story that claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation.
Seck didn’t explain why people should not quibble over the Trump administration’s use of “obliterate” when the available evidence suggested otherwise. Instead, he literally pushed White House propaganda about the strikes:
Here’s the White House’s official website that has the reports of 17 officials who were closer to the operation than these news outlets could ever dream of. All 17 made the claim that Iran’s nuclear sites were, in fact, very badly damaged by the U.S. strikes. In a matchup of 17 officials closely involved in the strike vs one anonymous intelligence leak, the United States (which boasts the greatest military the world has ever seen) had better odds in regards to utterly destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Nicholas Fondacaro, was continuing to quibble over the CNN report:
Following the highly anticipated Pentagon press conference from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force General Dan Caine, where the former called out the lies of the liberal media, on Thursday,CNN News Central hosts Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner rushed to falsely claim that Hegseth had “confirmed” their reporting about the untrue battle damage assessment illegally leaked to CNN and other outlets.
Both hosts insisted that the initial reporting on the false assessment by national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand admitted that it was “low confidence” and only “preliminary.” But a NewsBusters investigation found that not to be true at all.
[…]In response to a request for comment, a CNN spokesperson said: “In the segment you reference, CNN anchors were discussing CNN’s reporting on the story as a whole and in fact pulled up screenshots of two separate CNN stories for reference. As CNN learned more information, we updated our audiences and our reporting. That is responsible journalism.”
Fondacaro, meanwhile, wouldn’t know responsible journalism if he tripped over it, given that he colluded with lawyers to smear CNN over a previous lawsuit.
Alex Christy was doing his own quibbling over “obliterate”:
Factcheck.org may not have a truth-o-meter like PolitiFact or a Pinocchio scale like The Washington Post, but their Tuesday article by Alan Jaffe still claimed that President Trump was false in saying that the B-2 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities “obliterated” their program. One of Jaffe’s main points of evidence was the fate of Iran’s centrifuges, but even his own selected expert has contradicted him elsewhere.
The crux of Jaffe’s argument was, “the key nuclear sites — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan– were not ‘obliterated,’ nor was damage done ‘to all Nuclear sites in Iran.’ And Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability is still viable, experts say.”
He also pointed to the infamous CNN and New York Times articles as his main source,
[…]It is true that battle damage assessment takes some time, but there are also several good and, most importantly, nonpartisan reasons to believe the CNN and New York Times articles have serious problems.
Curtis Houck fulfilled his Trump Regime Media obligations:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth left CNN seething with rage Thursday morning as he took to the Pentagon press room and, standing next to Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, tore the liberal media a new one for this days-long disinformation campaign using anonymous sources to falsely claim U.S. intelligence has determined the weekend airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites were a massive failure.
Regarding the sources who spoke to Deep State tool Natasha Bertrrand, Hegseth said whomever did this was “irresponsible” and “had an agenda to try to muddy the waters” with “a linchpin assumption” that was of low confidence from the Defense Intelligence Agency. As for the press, Hegseth excoriated them for “cheer[ing] against Trump so hard” as though it’s “in your DNA and in your blood.”
He added the liberal media are always “searching for scandals” and have thus undercovered “historic moments like recruiting” across the board because it’s happening “under President Trump’s leadership” and thus “the press corps doesn’t want to write about it.”
The Defense Secretary then turned the wick up on CNN and its allies for the leak and distortion of the DIA report:
We remember that the MRC was cheering hard against President Biden, as though it was in their DNA and in their blood. Houck didn’t note that Hegseth offered any actual evidence to back up what he said. As we’ve already noted, Houck later gushed:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had one of her strongest briefings yet Thursday afternoon as she launched one scathing broadside after another at the liberal media for their anonymously sourced stories falsely claiming the weekend U.S. military airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites were a failure, calling these “agenda-driven leaks” and “fake and false narratives” led by CNN’s Deep State laundry person Natasha Bertrand.
Houck did not note that Leavitt offered any evidence to disprove Bertrand’s reporting beyond her loud, partisan ranting.