In the wake of President Donald Trump’s call to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, CNN reported that the commander in chief oversold the destruction caused by the attacks per an early Defense Intelligence Agency assessment. Trump, in turn, scolded CNN, calling for the firing of reporter Natasha Bertrand and hurling insults and accusations of “fake news” at the network.
CNN’s Jake Tapper went on air Wednesay with a message for the president and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: Don’t shoot the messenger.
“They’re calling journalists ‘fake news’ for true stories! They’re calling for an excellent CNN reporter, Natasha Bertrand, to be fired, which is preposterous,” Tapper said. “The Trump administration is also accusing any news media who reports on this intel assessment as not being patriotic,” he later added.
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Throughout Tapper’s segment for “The Lead,” the journalist condemned the Trump administration’s trend of “shooting the messengers in an increasingly ugly way.” The role of the media, Tapper said, is to question authority and press for facts at all times, regardless of any notion of so-called “patriotism.”
Following Trump’s order to bomb key nuclear sites in Iran, the president went on to call the mission a complete success, saying the sites were “obliterated.” The DIA’s assessment, however, said that obliteration was far from the truth; CNN’s reporting said that seven people familiar with the assessment verified that it said the bombing “did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program” and merely set it back a few months.
Bertrand’s reporting hedges on making any definitive statements on the attack itself. She attributes information to the DIA assessment and those familiar with it while emphasizing that the report was in its early stages.
“The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available,” Bertrand’s article reads. “But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes ‘completely and totally obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.”
Tapper adds that the bombs used in the Iran strike were untested, leading to a natural question of how much damage they can do: “No one is questioning whether this was a heroic and valiant effort on behalf of the United States,” he said. “The key questions for the American people and the world are simply about the degree of success of the operation.”
“Our obligation as journalists is not to praise President Trump or protect his feelings, or to disparage, or to praise him, for that matter,” he said. “Our obligation is to report facts.”
Tapper underscored that reporting on government documents like this is a necessary responsibility of the press. The CNN host cited the Pentagon Papers, first published by The New York Times in 1971, as an example proving the importance of unflinching journalism. Reporting on these papers, Tapper said, showed that “officials had been lying to the American people for years.”
The reporter ended by decrying Trump’s notion that blind support is the same thing as patriotism.
“History has taught us that the most pro-service member action we can take is to ask questions of our leaders, especially in times of war,” Tapper concludes. “That, for journalists, is the height of patriotism.”
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