nuclear-news

The Iranian people achieved decisive victory against America’s criminal war on them

Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 10 Apr 26, https://theaimn.net/the-iranian-people-achieved-decisive-victory-against-americas-criminal-war-on-them/

The Chicago Tribune’s editorial ‘There has been no victory yet for the Iranian people’ represents an astonishing betrayal of the urgent need to condemn President’s criminal war on Iran. The Trib’s focus is not on the 42,000 Iranian buildings damaged or destroyed, of which 36,000 were residential homes. The No mention of the school bombed killing over 150 little girls, among over 3,000 dead Iranians Trump murdered in his senseless war. Absent was any mention the US began the war with a heinous war crime, greenlighting Israel’s assassinating Iranian ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Stating the Trib was “relieved” Trump didn’t kill off Iranian civilization as threatened, a genocidal war crime, without the most urgent of condemnations is deplorable.

The Trib states both the US and Iran declaring victory is “hardly surprising.” That certainly applies to Trump’s America which can never admit defeat, but not Iran. They punched back with astonishing effectiveness. Their tens of thousands of well-hidden missiles shot down US planes, sent aircraft carriers scurrying beyond their range, badly damaged US Gulf States bases requiring thousands of US personnel to be relocated to hotels.
Result? Trump cried uncle and entered into a tenuous ceasefire without achieving a single of the shifting war objectives.

Worse yet? The US war failure shut down the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off a fifth of the worldwide oil supply. This has sent the world economy teetering toward recession, if not depression.

Trump’s acceptance of Iran’ s 10 point ceasefire plan as a basis for upcoming negotiations verifies Trump’s catastrophic loss. It requires end to US criminal war with no further attacks on Iran, Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities and defensive missile arsenal. US to leave the Middle East. US to end all sanctions on Iran. US to pay reparations for war damage.

Most disappointing in the Trib’s Iran war editorial is regurgitating Trump’s “three justifiable reasons….for this war” All three are nonsense. Did it occur to the Trib Editorial Board that if those reasons were truly justifiable, the Trib should be encouraging Trump to press on to total victory?

The editorial concludes “that inevitably leads us to an accounting that little has been achieved. A hollow victory at a heavy price.” Indeed, nothing was achieved but senseless death and destruction, the US possibly on the way out of the region, and the world economy in jeopardy from the US handing over the Strait of Hormuz to an emboldened and soon to be prosperous Iran.

Sure sounds like a resounding Iranian victory and US loss to this observer.

April 13, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Washington Post Promotes Nuclear Agenda Tied to Bezos’ Investments

The piece contains no disclosure about Bezos’ financial ties to the nuclear energy sector, continuing a trend previously identified by FAIR (11/20/25). Bezos is the largest individual shareholder of Amazon, which has invested $500 million in small modular reactor nuclear (SMR) startup X-Energy. X-Energy recently signed a letter of intent to explore deployment in areas that include Illinois. Amazon is a member of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which advocated to end the state’s moratorium.

Peter Castagno, 1 April 26, https://fair.org/home/washington-post-promotes-nuclear-agenda-tied-to-bezos-investments/

The Washington Post has devoted four editorials to supporting the expansion of nuclear energy in the past three months, relying on factual errors and distortions to make the case for the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to nuclear safety regulation. The Post‘s owner, Jeff Bezos, is the chair of Amazon, a company dependent on electricity-guzzling data centers that invested more than $1 billion in nuclear energy last year.

The first of the editorials (1/15/26) was headlined “The Facts About Nuclear Energy Are Sinking In. Even in Illinois.” It lauded Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s decision to end the state’s moratorium on building new nuclear plants.

The piece contains no disclosure about Bezos’ financial ties to the nuclear energy sector, continuing a trend previously identified by FAIR (11/20/25). Bezos is the largest individual shareholder of Amazon, which has invested $500 million in small modular reactor nuclear (SMR) startup X-Energy. X-Energy recently signed a letter of intent to explore deployment in areas that include Illinois. Amazon is a member of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which advocated to end the state’s moratorium.

‘Clean energy’ (except the toxic waste)

The Washington Post editorial said of Pritzker:

The 2028 presidential hopeful personified the Democratic Party’s gradual realization that the country cannot meet its electricity needs—let alone combat climate change—without embracing the world’s largest source of clean energy.

As FAIR has previously noted, leading experts dispute the claim that nuclear energy is essential to address climate change. Describing it as “clean” obscures unresolved problems such as radioactive waste. More than 100,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored in pools requiring active cooling and dry casks throughout the country—over 11,000 tons in Illinois alone, the largest stockpile of any state.

An expert report published the same day as the Post‘s Illinois editorial, co-authored by former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane, described the situation as a national imperative: The federal government has collected more than $50 billion from ratepayers for a waste repository it has never built, paid more than $12 billion to reactor owners in damages for failing to take the waste, and is projected to pay an additional $40 billion more.

Illinois’ 1987 moratorium was a bipartisan measure signed into law by a Republican governor that prohibited construction of new nuclear plants until the federal government identified and approved a means of disposing of radioactive waste. That condition has never been fulfilled. The Post omits the reason for the moratorium, instead characterizing nearly four decades of policy as a “perplexing attitude” driven by ideological environmental activists:

Illinois has suffered for decades from serious cognitive dissonance on nuclear energy. The state boasts the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear reactors, generating more than half its electricity from those plants. Yet lawmakers in Springfield followed the lead of environmental activists who regard the industry with open disdain…. That perplexing attitude is finally changing.

The Post also did not consider how the state’s years-long criminal nuclear scandal might affect its residents’ views. Since 2020, Illinois utility Exelon and its subsidiary Commonwealth Edison have agreed to more than $200 million in fines with federal authorities for bribing political figures to pass legislation that included roughly $2.35 billion in nuclear subsidies—the same subsidies Exelon has repeatedly stated it requires to keep its Illinois plants operating. The scandal is part of a broader pattern of corruption in the industry that the Post elided in other editorials.

Celebrating safety rollbacks

A month later, under the headline “America’s Nuclear Future,” the Washington Post editorial board (2/14/26) championed the Trump administration’s nuclear safety rollbacks:

Sometimes, regulators have even forced changes to designs mid-construction, as happened in 2009, when they required containment buildings for reactor developments in Georgia and South Carolina to be able to withstand direct aircraft strikes, driving up costs and delaying construction.

The editorial board invoked the Vogtle project in Georgia and the VC Summer project in South Carolina as cautionary tales about regulatory overreach. The Post did not mention that VC Summer’s failure in South Carolina was primarily caused by executive fraud and mismanagement (Power, 10/15/21).

Further, a senior representative of Southern Nuclear, the operator of  Georgia’s Vogtle reactors, recently attributed reactor construction delays to macroeconomic events and lead contractor Westinghouse’s bankruptcy rather than over-regulation. The new reactors cost $35 billion, more than twice the original estimate, and were completed seven years late in 2024.

The Post claimed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission forced changes while reactors were “mid-construction” in 2009, but physical construction for both projects did not begin until 2013, as noted by Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the pro-nuclear source they cited.

The Post made other misleading claims in the article regarding the science of radiation dangers. The editorial board expressed support for the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically weaken the NRC’s radiation guidelines, which are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. LNT maintains cancer risk as proportional to radiation dose, with even tiny amounts causing small but real risks, particularly for infants and vulnerable populations. The Post wrote:

The science underpinning the radiation rule is mushy, at best. It’s based on a theory that because radiation poses a serious cancer risk at high doses, it must also pose a low risk at lower doses.

It is irresponsible for a reputable news outlet to describe the science supporting LNT as “mushy.” As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (10/15/25) recently explained, the use of LNT model for radiation has been repeatedly affirmed by authoritative scientific bodies, including “the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, virtually all international scientific bodies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the NRC itself.”

The Post did disclose Amazon’s nuclear energy investments in the February 14 piece, and in two following editorials. But those disclosures don’t convey the scope of their efforts to influence nuclear policy.

Amazon spent nearly $19 million on lobbying last year, including on nuclear energy–related issues. Amazon Data Services is a member of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nation’s biggest trade group pushing to cut safety regulations—the same NEI that recently celebrated the Post’s inclusion of nuclear energy in its “25 Good Things That Happened in 2025.” In January, the Bezos Earth Fund donated $3.5 million to the Nuclear Scaling Initiative to help coordinate bulk purchases of standard reactor designs. Shannon Kellogg, vice president of public policy at Amazon, chairs the Data Center Coalition, another prominent lobby group that has pushed nuclear safety regulatory rollbacks.

Don’t mention the P-word

The Washington Post’s next pro-nuclear editorial (2/22/26)—headlined “Fixing America’s Broken Nuclear Supply”—advocated the practice of nuclear reprocessing, which refers to the separation of uranium and plutonium from spent fuel. The extracted materials are then repurposed for use as reactor fuel, but also can be used to create nuclear weapons.

The Post editorial did not contain the word “plutonium.” It glossed over the proliferation risk, the foremost historical concern with reprocessing, only mentioning it once:

President Jimmy Carter banned the practice out of fears of weapons proliferation. President Ronald Reagan later reversed that decision, but reprocessing never rebounded, mostly because nuclear companies decided that sourcing new uranium was more cost-effective.

Reprocessing was originally invented to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons. India used it to create a nuclear bomb from its atomic energy program in 1974, which Carter explicitly cited as the impetus for the ban. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton also did not encourage reprocessing due to proliferation concerns.

‘Crucial to power AI’

In its most recent nuclear editorial—“The Government’s Freeze on Nuclear Energy Is Thawing”—the Washington Post (3/6/26) celebrated the NRC’s March approval of a construction permit for Bill Gates’ SMR startup TerraPower:

Something shocking happened this week: Bureaucrats approved a project ahead of schedule. Even better, it was for a nuclear project that promises to make energy production safer and cleaner than traditional reactors. The government still holds back America’s nuclear industry too much, but it’s a victory worth celebrating.

The Trump administration has taken unprecedented measures to accelerate new nuclear reactors. It has secretly overhauled nuclear safety rules, proposed to severely cut inspections and radiation standards, and exempted new reactors from environmental reviews. Over 400 NRC employees have left the agency since Trump took office. These developments were not concerning to the Post, however, which wrote “the government still holds back America’s nuclear industry too much.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Lyman warned that the NRC’s fast-tracked review for TerraPower failed to address serious safety concerns inherent to its design. The Post’s claim about TerraPower’s safety ignores unresolved issues admitted to by the NRC in the agency’s December safety evaluation:

The staff did not come to a final determination on the adequacy and acceptability of functional containment performance due to the preliminary nature of the design and analysis.

Unlike traditional reactors, TerraPower’s design does not include a physical containment dome to guard against the release of radioactive material in the event of a meltdown.

The Post wrote:

The speed with which the NRC has been able to review the TerraPower project is a testament to growing bipartisan support for climate-friendly nuclear energy. In June 2024, shortly after the company submitted its application, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill called the Advance Act to cut red tape. Those reforms were crucial given the surging demand for new energy to power artificial intelligence.

The Post presented TerraPower’s rapid review as a “testament to growing bipartisan support for climate-friendly nuclear energy.” It does not mention that Trump fired the former Democratic NRC chair for the first time in its agency’s history, and its two remaining Democratic commissioners told lawmakers they believe they could be fired for refusing to approve reactors for safety reasons. Multiple Democratic lawmakers who voted in favor of the Advance Act have lambasted the Trump administration’s actions to expedite reactor approvals as dangerous and illegal.

The Post editorial did not mention the primary impetus for TerraPower’s rapid licensing process: a series of executive orders Trump signed last May. They directed the NRC to approve new reactors within 18 months, consult with DOGE on a wholesale revision of its regulations, and weaken radiation protections rooted in its “overly risk-averse culture.” A recent ProPublica investigation (3/20/26) revealed that nuclear firms were given the opportunity to offer edits for the EOs, many of which are financially connected to DOGE’s leadership.

‘Energy to cost less’

The Post went on to claim expanding nuclear energy will lower energy costs: “Anyone who wants energy to cost less should be excited about the US producing more of it.”

Yet as FAIR (4/21/16) explained in a 2016 analysis, Lazard investment bank’s widely cited, annual levelized cost of energy report has repeatedly found nuclear energy to be far more expensive than renewables, a finding that remains unchanged in its most recent report.

The Post claimed that the new generation of Silicon Valley–backed SMRs will be cheaper than traditional reactors, but the first expected commercial SMR project was canceled in 2023 due to repeated cost overruns that spent over $600 million in federal funds.

X-Energy, the SMR firm backed by Amazon, has also steeply increased its cost projections. In 2021, the Department of Energy awarded TerraPower around $2 billion, and gave $1.2 billion to X-Energy. X-Energy’s projected cost estimates have surged since then, from roughly $2.5 billion in 2021 to a range of $4.75–5.75 billion in 2023.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis warned these cost increases should serve as a “red flag” in a 2024 analysis. It concluded:

Investment in SMRs will take resources away from carbon-free and lower-cost renewable technologies that are available today and can push the transition from fossil fuels forward significantly in the coming 10 years

As physicist MV Ramana argues in his book Nuclear Is Not the Solution (2024), tech billionaires like Bezos are backing nuclear energy rather than doubling down on renewables for reasons of ideology, military and government alliances, and, crucially, profit opportunities. X-Energy filed for an IPO last month, giving Amazon the opportunity to leverage AI and nuclear hype into a higher opening valuation.

When the Post’s editorial board (10/15/25) hailed small reactors last year as a “worthy gamble” in an editorial headlined “The Military’s Big Gamble on Small Nuclear Reactors,” it did not mention its owner stood to profit from that wager.

April 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Inspiring the Authentic Journalist: The Pentagon’s Renewed attack on Press Credentials

1 April 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark AIM Extra, https://theaimn.net/inspiring-the-authentic-journalist-the-pentagons-renewed-attack-on-press-credentials/

On March 20, 2026, US District Senior Judge Paul Friedman found for The New York Times in a ruling deeming the Pentagon’s media access policy in breach of the US Constitution. Central to the policy was the requirement that all credentialled journalists sign a pledge that officials would not be asked for information they were not authorised to release. The Pentagon Facilities Alternative Credentials (PFACs) policy was found to have violated the First Amendment for its lack of reasonableness and being “viewpoint-discriminatory,” and the Fifth Amendment for not outlining clear standards governing cases when press credentials can be denied.

The judge thought the policy’s purpose was rooted in notions of removing “disfavoured journalists” while filling, in their emptied ranks, those “favourable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Indeed, that happened, with an exodus of main stable news organisations refusing to take up the pledge, leaving those friendly to the administration to take their place in mild leisure and bigoted sympathy.

The irony there is that the Pentagon media pack do not, for the most part, need to be encouraged by such feeding practices. They normally swallow the slop and staple whole. Truly intrepid reporters wedded to sharp if ugly authenticity are rarely seen at press gatherings conducted and managed by officialdom in the capital cities of the world, certainly those in the business of defence and security. The issue is not the correctitude of the ruling that the PFAC policy breached the Constitution but the curious sense that the Fourth Estate was necessarily better informed for sharing desks in situ, or near officials, moving through corridors without invigilation and having what is known as “access” to aides and advisers

The judge certainly gave little thought in examining that premise, taking the evidence at face value that the “presence of PFAC holders at the Pentagon has enhanced the ability of journalists and news organizations to keep Americans informed about the US military while posing no security or safety risk to Department property or personnel.” (In what way?) The environs of the building also offered chances for press briefings, even those called at short notice, and opportunities to question officials at, before or after such briefings. Semi-formal and informal opportunities to question personnel also helped identify “the context and detail needed to report accurately and effectively about defense policy and military operations.”

The Pentagon promised to both appeal the ruling and introduce a revised restrictive policy as stridently buffoonish as its first one. Instead of abiding by the ruling to re-credential the Times reporters and permitting those who had refused to sign the pledge to have their passes restored, the department shut down access to most of the building. The intention is to house these bought scribblers in a new, and yet unbuilt annex. The decades-old Correspondents’ Corridor has been shut down, and journalists given limited unescorted access to a library at the complex’s periphery.

With The Times again taking the matter to court, Judge Friedman found these arrangements “weird.” “Is this a Catch-22? Is this Kafka?” Hardly. Had Franz Kafka advised this peculiar administration, he would have informed them about bureaucracy’s innumerable options of control regarding the media message in war. The press would have been given the grand review and assessment on battles and engagements, curated, scrupulously controlled. No wrinkles, no frowns. Questions would have been near irrelevant, lies, generously scattered and sprinkled.

At the hearing itself, Justice Department attorney Sarah Welch weakly suggested to Friedman that the information given to the paper may have been outdated: journalists could access a designated, temporary workspace directly from the Pentagon parking lot, or take the shuttle. Such is the nature of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s thin and ever thinning charity.

In addition to issues of access, Friedman was also concerned that a journalist’s credentials might be revoked if anonymity is offered to sources of information known to be classified or barred from release by statute. Merely asking a question cannot constitute grounds of punishment. “I thought I answered that question,” he explained in the hearing. “A journalist can always ask and they can ask anybody.”

The lawyer representing the Times, Ted Boutrous, pursued the obvious line that the revised interim policy was intended to “purge the Pentagon of reporters who are engaged in independent reporting.” This policy of sheer “gibberish” was merely a form of “gaslighting.” The Pentagon had “made the press credential we fought so hard to get back into a meaningless piece of plastic.” But did it really have much meaning to begin with?

Reporters were subsequently told by Commander Timothy Parlatore that any stern reviewing of credentials would ignore published work, focusing instead on journalists daring to sniff out classified or legally barred information. “Anytime a person with a security clearance has somebody that approaches them trying to solicit information, they’re supposed to report that.” The First Amendment was a relic farthest from his mind as he expressed satisfaction that the “constant leaks and constant reports about classified things” had “largely stopped.” The missions in Venezuela and Iran had been executed to perfection “without the same worry of the classified leaks.” His news is obviously of that unique variety: unchallenged and unverified.

Trump and his simian henchmen, some slobbering in sanguineous yearning and prayer (Hegseth again), would be surprised by the notion that the Fourth Estate is not to be bullied but seduced, not to be ridiculed but praised. Vanity in searching for a source often blights the searcher: confirmation bias and dreams of the scoop are imbibed with the establishment cocktail. Give the press pack a story, however, true, and they will run with it. Once the information limps to the newsroom, broadsheet or podcast, it will have been managed and mangled into spectral irrelevance, lost in the short-term stutters and moist mutterings of social media. It would have become just another establishment story.

In this context, leaks become more imperative than ever. As the Iran War groans on, the hunger for such disclosures is bound to be stimulated. Showing a stunning lack of foresight, the Trump administration’s attempt to control information through removing credentials or barring reporters’ access to most of the Pentagon may well encourage journalists to finally seek richer, more reliable alternatives. The public will get the copy it deserves, unmanaged and unspun by the media magicians in the department and the pliant regurgitators of the Pentagon Press Set.

April 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Fox News’ united front in support of Trump’s Iran war may be breaking down.

Host Laura Ingraham warns escalation could produce “cascading problems for the region,” political turmoil for the GOP

by Matt Gertz, MEDIA MATTERS 03/26/26 

Four weeks after President Donald Trump launched a poorly conceived war of choice against Iran, the lockstep support for the conflict that has characterized coverage from Fox News’ star hosts is beginning to fray. The power struggle is significant — it is not an exaggeration to suggest the course of the war might hinge on which Fox shows the president is watching.

Trump is clearly approaching a decision point over whether to further escalate the war. U.S. and Israeli forces have done a lot of damage to Iranian military targets, but its regime is intact, still controls its stockpiles of enriched uranium, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz, threatening the global trade in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer. The Pentagon is sending thousands of troops to the region and reportedly prepping options for a “final blow” — some of which would involve deploying U.S. forces on Iranian soil.

When Trump is considering policy options, he often takes guidance from his loyal propagandists at Fox. This Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran.

Against that backdrop, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned on Wednesday’s show that further U.S. action could produce devastating unintended consequences and suggested that Trump should refocus his attention on the domestic economy and political situation. 

“Iran knows it cannot win militarily, so it’s using the leverage it has by prolonging the conflict,” she said during her monologue at the top of the show. “Now, what do they want to do? They want to inflict maximum economic pain on the region, on the U.S., [on] the global economy as much as possible until they think Trump relents. But the White House doesn’t seem to be blinking.”

The host then aired a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt warning at her press briefing that day that “President Trump does not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell” against Iran. 

Ingraham did not seem impressed by Leavitt’s rhetoric.

“Well, the problem is obviously unleashing hell means destroying infrastructure, which itself causes a series of cascading problems for the region, including maybe outside the region — political problems for the president in a midterm election year,” she said.

Her air of skepticism continued throughout the show. 

While interviewing Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), she noted Pentagon reports of thousands of successful missions but commented, “I mean, this is a devastating blow, yet you know, we’re still there.”

“It’s not even a month old, obviously,” she continued, before asking, “But are you concerned about the public and people? Again, very short attention spans, very impatient for victory, as is President Trump, I might add. But in an election year, it’s easy to say politics don’t matter, but at some point politics do come into play.”

And in a third segment, she highlighted the disastrous polling on the Iran war, commenting, “It looks like people are pretty impatient. The American people are sending a message to President Trump that it’s time to put the focus back on the home front.”

Ingraham is inching toward the type of dissent that has been virtually absent from Fox’s coverage of the war, even as the broader right-wing media has split. Her colleagues have played key roles in convincing Trump to attack in the first place and are pushing for risky escalations. Ingraham herself briefly quibbled with Trump’s handling of an apparent U.S. strike that leveled an Iranian school, killing scores of children, but had supported the war itself, which she declared three weeks ago that Trump had already won. 

But if Ingraham is getting cold feet and trying to convince Trump not to escalate a war the public has soured on, she remains an outlier at the network. Indeed, if the president tuned in for the two hours following Ingraham’s program, he saw her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity argue not only that the war is going well and that Trump will inevitably lead the U.S. to victory, but that anyone who disagrees must want America to lose the war because they hate the president.

Watters began his show with a 10-minute monologue whose thesis was that “the Iranian regime is losing leverage fast as we continue to carry out thousands of sorties over enemy airspace.” After detailing various tactical victories, he touted a potential escalation………………………………………………. https://www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-relations/fox-news-united-front-support-trumps-iran-war-may-be-breaking-down

March 30, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Pete Hegseth’s War on Journalists (and Iran Too)

Pete Tucker, March 20, 2026, https://fair.org/home/pete-hegseths-war-on-journalists-and-iran-too/

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears to be in the midst of two conflicts, one…in Iran, and the other with the American free press over its coverage of the widening Middle East war.
—MS NOW‘s Sydney Carruth (3/13/26)

Last fall, nearly the entire Pentagon press corps was banned from the Pentagon after refusing to sign Pete Hegseth’s loyalty oath, which would have bound them to only report information “authorized” by the government (FAIR.org, 9/23/25). They were quickly replaced by pundits from Hegseth-approved outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and Lindell TV, which is “Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

But once the Iran War got underway, it dawned on Hegseth that a Defense secretary needs to communicate with the whole country, not just the narrow slice of it reached by his favorite right-wing pundits. So Hegseth reversed course, asking the major networks to bring their cameras back to the Pentagon. They agreed, but on one condition: Some of their reporters had to be allowed to return to the press briefing room, too.

So back they came, albeit now at the back of the room. Few of these reporters—who represent outlets you’ve actually heard of, like ABC, NBC and the New York Times—are called on. Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, instead fields questions almost exclusively from handpicked media personalities seated in the front rows. (I’d call them reporters, but if they signed Hegseth’s 2025 oath, as most did, they’re anything but.)

‘Typical gotcha-type question’

When Hegseth stepped to the podium for his first Iran War press briefing on March 2, there was a lot on the line. A skeptical American public wanted to know why President Trump had just launched another regime-change war, the very thing he’d railed against on the campaign trail. But Hegseth had little to offer, aside from “lots of chest-thumping,” a Pentagon reporter told CNN.

For the Q&A, Hegseth “only answered questions from his chosen outlets,” reported CNN’s Brian Stelter (3/4/26), until a journalist in the back lobbed a question about Trump’s changing timeline for the war’s duration. Hegseth initially ignored the interruption, but his anger got the best of him, and he returned to the matter.

“I heard the question about ‘four weeks,’” Hegseth sneered. “It’s the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question.”

Having veered away from his friendly questioners, Hegseth was off script and had to think on his feet, not exactly a strength.

“President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take—four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up, it could move back,” Hegseth said at the opening of a rant that somehow included the word “aperture” and the observation that, “well, I mean, Joe Biden didn’t even know what he was doing.”

‘Only favorable images’

After face-planting at his first Iran War press briefing, Hegseth knew change was needed—only not by him, but with his enemies in the press.

If Hegseth couldn’t kick out any more reporters, who could he get rid of? Scanning the room, he fixed on the photographers.

The Pentagon’s stated reason for banning press photographers after the March 2 briefing was because of space restrictions. But the real reason, the Washington Post (3/11/26) reported, was they took “unflattering” photos of Hegseth.

Now only Pentagon photographers are allowed into briefings, and they are happy to provide the media with approved photos of their boss. Alex Garcia, president of the National Press Photographers Association, told the Post:

Excluding photographers from Pentagon briefings because officials did not like how published images portrayed them shows an astonishingly poor sense of priorities in the midst of a war and is, for a public servant, not a good look…. A free press cannot function if government officials decide that only favorable images of public officials may be created or distributed.

In Hegseth’s March 4 press briefing—without those pesky photographers—he stuck again to his preferred outlets, like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Lindell TV and the Washington Times. He also took one question from a mainstream journalist, Tom Bateman of the BBC, who pressed Hegseth on the US bombing of an elementary school in Minab. “We’re investigating it,” Hegseth replied curtly.

‘A snowflake behind a military shield’

Among the many reporters who didn’t get called on was the Atlantic’s Nancy Youssef, although in her case it was because she wasn’t allowed in. “I, along with print photographers, have been denied entry to cover today’s Pentagon briefing,” Youssef wrote on X. “All other media were allowed in.”

By Hegseth’s next briefing, March 19, his banned list had expanded again. “The Pentagon’s own publication, Stars and Stripes, was disinvited from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest Iran War press conference—as he continues to clamp down on press coverage,” the Independent (3/19/26) reported.

This came less than two weeks after the Pentagon announced it was taking greater control of Stars and Stripes, a paper Hegseth previously claimed had gone “woke” (Daily Beast, 3/19/26). As former Stars and Stripes reporter Kevin Baron (X, 3/19/26) pointed out, the paper’s

employees are US Army civilians. Their editorial independence is protected by Congress specifically to prevent political leaders from feeding troops propaganda.

“Hegseth spent years on a comfortable Fox News couch building a brand around contempt for the thin-skinned and the easily offended,” wrote Status’s Jon Passantino (3/14/26). “But in office, Hegseth has revealed himself to be exactly that—a snowflake behind a military shield.”

‘An actual patriotic press’

As the US and Israel’s war on Iran continues to worsen, Hegseth’s attacks on the media have also escalated. At his March 13 briefing, Hegseth insisted that “an actual patriotic press” wouldn’t write headlines stating the war is expanding, even as the war has sprawled from an initial three countries—Israel, the US and Iran—to over a dozen.

“Allow me to make a few suggestions,” Hegseth offered. “People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines [like]… ‘Mideast War Intensifies,’” he said. “What should the banner read instead? How about, ‘Iran Increasingly Desperate.’”

Hegseth also singled out a CNN story (3/13/26), headlined “Trump Administration Underestimated Iran War’s Impact on Strait of Hormuz.” That story is “patently ridiculous, of course,” Hegseth said, blithely dismissing the strait’s closure, saying we “don’t need to worry about it.”

Hegseth’s worries were directed elsewhere—at CNN. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth said.

Ellison is the 43-year-old nepo baby of billionaire Larry Ellison, a close Trump ally. Having already purchased Paramount, and with it CBS, Ellison is on the verge of closing a $110 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns, among other media and film properties, CNN.

Hegseth’s comments about Ellison taking over CNN “should be a major scandal,” wrote Craig Aaron (Pressing Issues, 3/17/26), co-CEO of Free Press (the media advocacy group, not the right-wing, Ellison-owned outlet of the same name). “But in the chaos of the Trump administration, he’s just a warm-up act.”

‘Sick and demented people’

Indeed, as Trump’s historically unpopular war continues to sour, he’s sought to place blame on a familiar target: news media. Outlets critically covering the war, Trump posted on Truth Social (3/14/26), “are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.” The next day (3/15/26), he declared they “should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Treason is punishable by death.

Trump’s censorious FCC chair, Brendan Carr, backed up his boss: “The law is clear,” he tweeted (3/14/26). “Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Hegseth succinctly outlined what “operating in the public interest” looks like at his March 19 briefing. The press need only say “one thing to President Trump,” he said. “Thank you.”

March 23, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

US Media Mostly Care for Iranians When They Can Be Used to Justify Bombing

by repeatedly bringing up Iranian state brutality, US corporate media effectively distract from the brutality of the strikes on Iran

the fact that the government “oppresses women”—forever a favorite talking point of the same media outlets that advocated for bombing Afghan women to save them from the Taliban.

the media’s tendency to humanize Iranians only when they can be portrayed as victims of their own government.

Belén Fernández, March 2, 2026, https://fair.org/home/us-media-mostly-care-for-iranians-when-they-can-be-used-to-justify-bombing/

The United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28, propelling the entire region into a predictable cataclysm of unprecedented proportions.

This puts paid to the alleged “peacemaking” project of US President Donald Trump, who was supposed to be keeping the country out of international wars rather than actively seeking to expedite the end of the world.

The attacks put an abrupt end to the negotiations underway between the US and Iran—to the delight of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always viewed as anathema anything remotely resembling diplomacy or the pursuit of peace.

‘Trigger Iran to retaliate’

Three days before the joint strikes, a Politico exclusive (2/25/26) reported that “senior advisers” to Trump “would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country.” As per the report, administration officials were “privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a US strike.”

So much for subsequent US/Israeli attempts to cast the assault as “preemptive” in nature. Indeed, there is nothing at all “preemptive” about forcing Iran to retaliate; this is instead what you would call a deliberate provocation.

Unfortunately for the “senior advisers,” Trump and Netanyahu ultimately opted to pull the trigger simultaneously, thus depriving the US administration of its fabricated casus belli.

‘A clear explanation of the strategy’

In the aftermath of the strikes, certain US corporate media outlets unleashed ostensible critiques of the war—having apparently spontaneously forgotten their own fundamental role in paving the warpath by devoting the past several decades to demonizing the Iranian government (or “regime,” as we are required to refer to imperial foes).

The New York Times editorial board (2/28/26), for example, immediately penned an intervention titled “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?”—the headline of which was later amended to “Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless.”

This is the same New York Times, of course, that has been known to publish such masterpieces as “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” (3/25/15), a 2015 call to arms by former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Now, after calling out Trump’s “reckless” attack, the Times editorial board proceeds to undertake its own rationalization of war on Iran—provided it is overseen by “a responsible American president” who takes the time to offer “a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon.”

Because Trump could give fuck all about being “responsible,” however, the US newspaper of record assumes the duty of laying out the litany of Iranian transgressions for its readers, such as the killing of “hundreds of US service members in the region”—decisive proof that “Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions.”

Never mind the hundreds of thousands of regional deaths wrought in recent years by the (already nuclear-equipped) US military, including on account of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which the Times and like-minded media did their best to shove down the throats of the American public.

‘Few recent parallels’

Following the weekend’s strikes on Iran, many US media were quick to mention the Iranian government’s response to protests that erupted in December against high inflation. The Washington Post (2/28/26), for instance, specified that the “strikes come in the wake of a violent crackdown by Iran’s security forces…on anti-government demonstrations.”

Citing reports of “more than 7,000 people dead,” the Post went on to lament that “the level of violence against protesters has few recent parallels, human rights groups say.”

Not mentioned in such reports is the key role devastating US sanctions on Iran—a form of lethal violence in themselves—played in fomenting the protests in the first place. Ditto for Israel’s own admitted interference; Mossad’s Farsi-language X account urged Iranians to “Go out together into the streets. The time has come.” The Jerusalem Post (12/29/25) reported that the intelligence agency continued: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

“Foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed,” Tamir Morag of Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 remarked (Times of Israel, 1/16/26). “Everyone is free to guess who is behind it,” he winked.

But by repeatedly bringing up Iranian state brutality, US corporate media effectively distract from the brutality of the strikes on Iran, which happen to be perpetrated by two states that have zero “parallels” in terms of “levels of violence.” The ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip has officially killed more than 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023, though household surveys indicate the true toll could be substantially higher (Lancet, 2/18/26).

In its own antiwar-but-not-really dispatch, the Times editorial board also took care to reference how Iran “massacred” protesters, as well as the fact that the government “oppresses women”—forever a favorite talking point of the same media outlets that advocated for bombing Afghan women to save them from the Taliban.

Unuseful victims

It can be safely filed under the “can’t make this shit up” category that among the first casualties of the current war on Iran were the at least 175 people confirmed dead in a missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab.

While the establishment media initially treated this particular atrocity as a brief aside (Washington Post, 12/28/26; Wall Street Journal, 12/28/26)—leaving the job of actual reporting to independent outlets like Middle East Eye (2/28/26) and Drop Site News (2/28/26)—it eventually became unavoidable. As the corpses of young children are of no use to the imperial narrative when they are killed by the US and Israel rather than by Iran, however, the requisite moral condemnation has been in short supply.

Nor has much attention been paid to the hundreds of other casualties of the US/Israeli strikes, which is unsurprising given the media’s tendency to humanize Iranians only when they can be portrayed as victims of their own government. While the death toll made headlines in outlets like Al Jazeera (3/2/26) and Truthout (3/2/26), in major US media like the New York Times (3/2/26) and Washington Post (3/2/26), it was basically a footnote.

Three US troops killed in Iran’s retaliatory strikes, on the other hand, have received considerable airtime, with the Associated Press (3/1/26) noting that these were “the first American casualties in a major offensive that President Donald Trump said could likely lead to more losses in the coming weeks.”

And as the entire region rapidly goes up in flames, it seems those senior US advisers may have gotten their casus belli, after all.

March 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | 1 Comment