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CNN anchor Abby Phillip sounded the alarm on Thursday night over the White House’s efforts to punish the media for reporting on a preliminary intelligence assessment of the Iran military strikes represent a “slippery slope to the autocratic governing that Donald Trump claims to be against.”
Philip’s warning comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fiery press conference on the effectiveness of “Operation Midnight Hammer,” which featured the one-time Fox News morning host assailing CNN and other news outlets – including a former Fox colleague – for covering an intel report that indicated the bombing raid on three underground facilities only set Iran’s nuclear program back a few months.
Besides railing against the “fake news” for publishing articles on the assessment issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon chief outright told journalists on Thursday what they should report and how they should report it.
“How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don‘t know, fly a plane for 36 hours? How about we celebrate that?” Hegseth demanded. “How about we talk about how special America is, that only we have these capabilities?!”At one point, he even told the press corps: “Wave an American flag. Be proud of what we accomplished because Americans are responding to [Trump] as commander in chief.”
Meanwhile, the president has demanded that CNN fire reporter Natasha Bertrand for breaking the intel assessment story, a call his press secretary Karoline Leavitt has echoed. He’s also threatened to sue the network and The New York Times for reporting on the DIA report – which contradicts the president’s boast that Iran’s nuclear program was “totally and completely obliterated.”
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In letters to the Times and CNN, Trump’s lawyers claimed the news reports had damaged the president’s reputation and demanded that the outlets “retract and apologize for” the stories since they were “false” and “unpatriotic.” A lawyer for the New York Times, however, told the president’s legal team that “no apology will be forthcoming” and “no retraction is needed,” while CNN responded in similar fashion.
At the top of her roundtable show on Thursday night, Phillip took aim at the administration’s anti-media campaign amid questions over the effectiveness of the airstrikes in Iran, worrying that the goal is to force the free press to act as state-run propagandists.
“When the state tells you what you should report, say and do, that‘s a slippery slope to the autocratic governing that Donald Trump claims to be against,” the CNN anchor began.
“But that’s what’s happening in this surreal episode of outrage over an early intelligence report from his administration, his intelligence community, about his military operation against Iran, a report that CNN and other media outlets are simply reporting the existence of and not casting aspersions at the military operation was a failure,” she continued.
Noting that the “very early assessment” contradicts the president’s claims of “total obliteration of the nuclear program,” which was the reason the administration gave for striking Iran in the first place, Phillip added that the president and his acolytes were taking cues from a well-worn playbook.
“Now, it’s nothing new that Trump and his allies will go to great lengths to protect him from scrutiny, but they are now using the military as a shield and the media as a punching bag,” she concluded. “They want everyone singing from the same songbook, and if you’re not compliant, you‘re in their crosshairs.”
Indeed, besides ranting that the coverage of the Iran assessment was “defamatory” because early intelligence reports are “almost always wrong,” the White House has also painted CNN and other news organizations as hating the troops because of their reporting.
“I just want to thank our pilots. You know, they were maligned and treated very bad, demeaned by fake news CNN, which is back there, believe it or not, wasting time,” Trump fumed on Wednesday. “So they just waste a lot of time, wasting my time. And The New York Times, they put out a story that, ‘well, maybe they were hit, but it wasn’t bad.’ Well, it was so bad that they ended the war. It ended the war!”
In response to the administration’s allegations that CNN was looking to “demean” the US military, anchor Pamela Brown called the claims “blatantly manipulative,” “absolutely false,” and a “straw man argument.”
