Political analyst Mark Halperin criticized the media on Thursday for using an early information assessment of the damage caused by the US Saturday bombing, which was given to Iran’s nuclear program, to portray President Donald Trump as a liar.
Trump on Saturday said the bombing “completely wiped out” Iran’s important nuclear sites; CNN and New York Times The report, published based on the information report, found that the attack could only delay Iran’s nuclear program by a few months. Halperin, “Morning meetingAlthough Trump said he exaggerated the destruction, news outlet reports were attempts to underestimate the effectiveness of the strike despite a lack of certainty in intelligence assessments. (Related: “They don’t know what they’re doing”: Trump will drop off in Iran and Israel)
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“I thought I knew how the media worked, but apparently I wasn’t. We were yesterday. The president continues to exaggerate the incident,” Halperin said. “The people around him, like the Secretary of State and his spokesman and the Secretary of Defense. [Pete Hegseth]pretending to be in a stylistic and adjustable manner with an attitude of agreeing to the president, but in most cases they are not actually moving forward to the president to qualify for the damages caused to Iran’s nuclear program. ”
“And the media is just – it’s insane, because Pete Hegses is right. They issued pieces of preliminary reports and framed them as if the president was lying. “The pieces of preliminary reports by some of the Intelligence Reports community should not have been cast, as did CNN and the New York Times, as did the CNN and the New York Times, as well as the definitive judgment as to whether it worked. Whether it was sane or not.
CNN and The New York Times both featured their work, noting that intelligence ratings contradict Trump’s claims.
“[T]His early discoveries oppose President Donald Trump’s repeated claims. The Strike “completely wiped out Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility,” CNN wrote.
“The initial damage assessment suggests that President Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear facility has been “exterminated,” is being exaggerated,” the NYT wrote.
Both CNN and NYT used unnamed sources for their reports.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Iranian government all contradict CNN’s articles on leaked preliminary DIA damage reports, claiming that the strike has generally caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program.
DIA later described the rating as “unreliable.”
Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly criticized the use of anonymous sources in a CNN report on “Cuomo” on Wednesday. CNN first reported on intelligence ratings.
“CNN tries to reduce bombing using four anonymous sources. That’s what they’re doing. But even worse, it was a news outlet that picked up that as a fact. The anonymous source is simple. There’s no one there,” O’Reilly said. “No one has gone to look under the mountains. Iranians can’t even do that because the mountains can collapse above them. There is absolutely no major source report on the damage caused by American planes.”
“It’s ridiculous. The capable journalistic editors didn’t print the article, but in every day moments they dumped it because CNN is in business to make Trump look bad,” he added.
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