America Is Winning in Iran and the Media’s Most Panicked Correspondent Can’t Handle It
Dan Froomkin Hopes for Military Defeat in Iran
While Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was standing at a Pentagon podium announcing that Iran’s navy now resides at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, Dan Froomkin — media critic, founder of the watchdog blog Press Watch, and America’s most reliably hysterical correspondent — was busy typing 1,200 words explaining why nobody was asking the right questions. The answer to “who is the worst journalist covering the Iran war” is not even close: it’s Froomkin, a man so committed to catastrophism that he managed to criticize the mainstream media for being too cheerful about a war that hadn’t even started yet.
The Press Watch Correspondent Who Sees Doom in Every Briefing Room
Froomkin, who runs a media criticism blog called Press Watch, published a piece complaining that American journalists were failing to adequately warn the public about the horrors of war with Iran — at a point when the U.S. military had barely finished circling the runway. His thesis: reporters aren’t screaming loudly enough. His evidence: they aren’t screaming loudly enough. His solution: more screaming.
Meanwhile, the actual military situation has developed into what Hegseth described as “twice the air power of Shock and Awe in Iraq in 2003.” Iran’s Supreme Leader is dead. Iran’s air force is, per the Pentagon, destroyed. The Iranian navy — once described by geopolitical analysts as a significant regional threat — is currently participating in a reef-building program in the Persian Gulf at the involuntary invitation of the U.S. military. Operation Epic Fury has, in four days, accomplished what forty-seven years of diplomacy could not.
The Intercept and the Art of Spinning Victory Into Scandal
Not far behind Froomkin in the competition for Most Detached From Reality is The Intercept, which published a piece under the headline “Rubio Admits That America Is Fighting Israel’s War.” The implication being that defending American interests and standing with an ally is something to be ashamed of — a novel theory of foreign policy available exclusively to people who have never had to worry about ballistic missiles being aimed at them.
The Intercept’s institutional worldview holds that any American military action is, by definition, imperialist aggression. The destruction of Iran’s nuclear program infrastructure, the elimination of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, the sinking of a hostile navy — these events presumably appear in their editorial Slack channel as a series of increasingly agitated crying emojis.
CNN’s Analysis Desk: Where Military Victories Go to Get Complicated
CNN, to its credit, has covered the war extensively. To its discredit, it has spent approximately equal airtime asking whether Trump might “get bored” with winning and whether the whole thing could “go disastrously wrong.” Their analysts cited historian Max Boot, who offered the memorable observation that the war was “unwarranted and illegal” before adding — somewhat graciously — that it might not be unsuccessful. This is the geopolitical equivalent of saying the surgeon probably shouldn’t have operated but at least the patient isn’t dead yet.
CNN also devoted significant energy to the polling analysis angle, noting ominously that only 77% of Republicans supported the strikes. This is the kind of statistic that, in any other context, would be described as “overwhelming support.”
Senator Warren’s Media Allies and the Classified Briefing Panic Tour
Sen. Elizabeth Warren emerged from a classified intelligence briefing this week to announce, via social media video, that things were “so much worse than you thought.” She did not specify worse than whom, or what they thought, or in what direction worse was pointing — given that Iran’s nuclear program has been flattened, its supreme leader eliminated, and its navy sunk, the “worse” in question may have referred to the Iranian government’s situation specifically.
The left-wing media covered Warren’s apocalyptic post-briefing press availability as though she had just emerged from a Situation Room revealing unknown catastrophe, rather than as a Democratic senator performing her constitutionally protected right to be extremely alarmed in front of cameras.
The Scoreboard Nobody in the Legacy Press Wants to Show You
Here is what Operation Epic Fury has actually accomplished in under a week, per official U.S. military reporting and the Pentagon’s own briefings:
- Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: eliminated
- Iranian Air Force: destroyed
- Iranian Navy: 17 ships sunk, zero vessels remaining in the Gulf of Oman
- Iranian ballistic missile infrastructure: systematically degraded
- Iranian nuclear program facilities: struck
- U.S. airspace control over Iran: near-complete
Froomkin’s question — “are journalists asking the hard questions?” — has an answer, and the answer is that some of them are so busy asking the hard questions that they have not gotten around to reporting any of the actual events. The Iranian regime is, as Hegseth put it, “toast.” The press is busy writing about whether toast is a good breakfast choice.
Why This Coverage Pattern Matters
The left-wing media’s instinct to frame every American military success as either illegal, reckless, or secretly a failure does not occur in a vacuum. It reflects a consistent ideological predisposition: that American power projected abroad is inherently suspect, that military success is a propaganda construct, and that any administration associated with Donald Trump cannot, by definition, be winning anything. This predisposition was evident in coverage of the Venezuela operation, the earlier Iranian nuclear strikes last June, and now Operation Epic Fury.
What it produces is a media landscape in which viewers and readers who rely exclusively on outlets like The Intercept, Common Dreams, or Dan Froomkin’s blog emerge with the impression that America is stumbling blindly into a quagmire — while the Pentagon is showing maps with zero Iranian navy vessels remaining on them.
The war is four days old. The results are, by any honest measure, historic. But you’d never know it if your primary news source is a man who thought the pre-war coverage wasn’t apocalyptic enough.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Dan Froomkin is the founder of Press Watch, a media criticism outlet that has long argued American journalists are insufficiently adversarial toward Republican administrations. He has been critical of mainstream media coverage of U.S. military operations for years. The Intercept is a left-wing investigative publication founded in 2014 that has consistently opposed U.S. military interventions. Operation Epic Fury is the name given by the U.S. military to the coordinated U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran that began February 28, 2026, which has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and destroyed much of Iran’s military capability in its first week of operations.