Among the errors to which journalists are prone, none is so common as the delusion of instant expertise. Assign a reporter to do an article about theoretical physics, and by the time he files his story, he’ll be convinced he’s Stephen Hawking. You see this sort of phony expertise everywhere in the media nowadays, including sports, where every ESPN panelist offers his predictions with rock-solid confidence, and never acknowledges his mistake when the team he’d picked to win ends up on the wrong side of a lopsided blowout.
Trafficking in fake expertise is routine practice at CNN, where their dwindling audience is now expected to believe that such personalities as Kasie Hunt and Erin Burnett know more about the effectiveness of U.S. military weapons than does Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It’s worth noting in this context that CNN invested heavily in the idea that Hegseth was not qualified to be in charge of the Pentagon, despite his experience as an officer in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.
Scarcely had the B-2 bombers returned from their bombing mission against Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility than CNN went to work to prove that the Air Force mission was a failure. Why would an American news network devote itself to such a task? Because the president of the United States — a guy named Donald Trump, perhaps you’ve heard of him — is a Republican, and CNN is staffed by what Professor Glenn Reynolds calls “Democratic operatives with bylines.” For the past decade, CNN’s coverage has been based on the fundamental assumption that everything Trump does is bad and everything Trump says is wrong. CNN is all anti-Trump, all the time, and, because Trump declared that the mission in Iran was a success, therefore CNN’s coverage was dictated by the assumption that “Operation Midnight Hammer” was a failure.
“A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive, precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime,” Trump declared in a Saturday night address from the White House, naming the three sites — Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — the latter two having been targeted by missiles fired from U.S. submarines. “Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
No, no, no, said CNN. On their Sunday program State of the Union, host Kasie Hunt interviewed a Democratic congressman, Rep. Jim Hines of Connecticut, asking him, “When we look at what the administration says that they have accomplished here, that they have set [the Iranian nuclear] program back significantly, that these strikes were successful, do you think the world is a safer place this morning than it was yesterday?”
Himes replied: “Kasie, stop. Look, that’s insane. That’s insane. You don’t need to be an intelligence professional to know that we have no idea whether these strikes were successful. Now, if what you’re looking for is a big boom and a large hole in the ground, I have very little doubt that our bunker-busters did a big boom and a very large hole in the ground. But, Kasie, we don’t know sitting here right now whether the highly enriched uranium was in the Fordow facility or in the Natanz facility. … We have no idea in the world right now whether these strikes were in any way successful.”
That was the starting line — “no idea” of the damage at the Iranian sites — from which CNN began its attempt to prove that the U.S. military had failed, although of course they did not stop there. Before we proceed further, however, let me first disclaim any expertise in such matters. I know nothing more about this situation than anyone can learn with a simple Google search and guess what? I’m pretty sure the same is true for Kacie Hunt. The difference between her and me is that, like everyone else at CNN, she’s suffering from a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and therefore Ms. Hunt is convinced that Trump must be wrong when he says the strikes on Iran “were a spectacular military success.”
Let us stipulate that Trump has a penchant for bombast, a preference for emphatic claims made while piling on superlative modifiers. Be that as it may, isn’t it fair to assume that the United States Air Force is rather competent at the business of dropping bombs? Those “bunker-busters” — GBU-57 MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator), to give them their proper name — have been under development for about 20 years. Each of these precision-guided munitions weighs 30,000 pounds and can reportedly penetrate 200 feet of earth or 60 feet of reinforced concrete before exploding.
All I know about this, I got from Wikipedia, but the Air Force dropped 14 — FOURTEEN! — of these monster bombs on the Fordow site, and my hunch is that this caused a lot of damage. Whether the phrase “completely and totally obliterated” is accurate, I can’t say, whereas CNN’s audience is encouraged to believe Iran’s nuclear facilities sustained only minor or superficial damage. (Like the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie who says, after having an arm lopped off: “Tis but a scratch.”)
President Trump had some choice words for CNN, calling them “gutless losers,” but predictably they doubled down on their claims. Tuesday evening, Erin Burnett was there “with the breaking news here in the Middle East” — she was reporting from the United Arab Emirates — “that Trump’s military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not destroy Tehran’s enrichment facilities.” Notice the certainty of that “did not,” which Burnett went on to say came from a “source” who supplied CNN with a “classified intelligence assessment that the facilities were not obliterated. And based on this early assessment, the damage to all three sites struck by the U.S. bombs was largely restricted to above ground structures.”
So, if you’re among the dwindling number of Americans who trust CNN (or the sources who leak classified intelligence to them), you must believe that those 14 GBU-57 MOPs didn’t penetrate anything, and did no real damage to the Fordow facility’s underground structures.
According to Burnett, “the U.S. strikes only set back that Iranian nuclear ambitions back by a few months.” And for all I know, that’s true, but on the other hand, when was the last time CNN got any major story right? They spent the better part of two years during Trump’s first term promoting the “Russian collusion” hoax and, during the furor over Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court, repeatedly featured Michael Avenatti making utterly unverified smears against Kavanaugh.
There is something called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where people tend to trust the news media despite their history of provable errors. CNN’s apparent reliance on this sort of amnesia has continued to the point where the only people watching the last-place cable network must be afflicted with brain damage. (But why bring Joe Biden into this?) Ratings are so low at CNN that their audience is routinely smaller than those watching reruns of Paw Patrol and Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon. Nevertheless, the Secretary of Defense felt it necessary to respond to CNN’s claims.
“Based on everything we have seen — and I’ve seen it all — our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said. “Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”
You know why CNN hates Hegseth, right? It’s not just that he’s working for the Trump administration, but also that he was previously employed by Fox News, a cable network that millions of people actually watch, while CNN is down there in the ratings basement hoping to beat Spongebob Squarepants.
It must be tough working for a formerly respected news organization that now has lower ratings than a children’s cartoon comedy, but CNN’s credibility has been “completely and totally obliterated,” so to speak, and they have only themselves to blame.
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