j. patrick coolican

Today’s media cheer against the US, overstate enemy abilities, understate ours and paint a picture that the US is losing, while we’re winning. It’s more true today as they cheer against Trump in Iran. Within 10 days weeks of this 2001 NYT doozy saying our military efforts in Afghanistan were bogged down, the key city of Mazar e Sharif fell to the US and our ally the Northern Alliance, and Kabul fell days later. This story was written a mere three weeks after our counter-offensive against Al Qaeda began. But that didn’t stop the NYT from saying we were already in a quagmire. The media are doing the same thing today in Iran. From a military point of view, Operation Epic Fury has been a huge success. We don’t know yet about who will run Iran, but the press will always see America’s cup as 1/10th empty. If today’s press covered WW II, they would have written mostly about civilian casualties, friendly fire, and failed missions, downplaying the overwhelming allied victories against the Nazis.

My personal belief is that the President, his team, and the Israelis know far better than the press what is going on, and the press is so relentlessly, ruthlessly hostile to the Trump Administration that they're more likely to believe Iranian propaganda than that this is actually going well. As I noted yesterday, the ordinance dropped is on pace to mirror Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom with a combined strike of about 1000 targets a day from the Israelis and Americans. That's pretty consistent. The fact that the national press is barely even covering Homeland Security being shut down by Democrats in a time of war is just another data point. If Obama were bombing Syria while the GOP had Homeland Security shut down, the GOP obstruction would be the primary story every day in the press. But because it is Trump, the press is elevating the doubters, the haters, and the propagandists. The press has a real bias in this.