On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump issued threat against Iran so apocalyptic it stunned some of his most radical supporters: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that shocks the conscience, even in a presidency defined by shock. With the war in Iran now entering its seventh week and spiraling toward an uncertain end, the statement landed like a warning flare. By day’s end, after setting off a global panic, the president backed down and announced a two-week ceasefire deal. Then, for the second time during this war, Trump lashed out at the media for supposedly spreading Iranian disinformation.
When the president announced the agreement in a post on his Truth Social platform, he noted he had “received a 10 point proposal from Iran” that he considered “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Reporting on the story, CNN posted a news brief headlined “Iran claims victory, says it forced US to accept 10-point plan” that included a statement from the Iranian Security Council critical of the U.S. reading, in part, “The enemy, in its unfair, unlawful, and criminal war against the Iranian nation, has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.” CNN anchor Erin Burnett also read aloud from the statement on her show: “Our hands remain upon the trigger and should the slightest error be committed by the enemy it shall be met with full force.”
Trump turned to Truth Social to air his anger. “The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows,” Trump wrote. “CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’ Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.”
Then, also for the second time since attacks on Iran began, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr followed up on the president’s attack with his own empty threats. “More outrageous conduct from CNN,” Carr wrote on X. “Fake news is bad enough for the country, but pushing out a hoax headline in such a sensitive national security moment as this requires accountability.” Carr, who holds no regulatory power over CNN, a cable news outlet, then concluded it”s “time for change at CNN.” Top Trump ally Larry Kudlow similarly lashed out at the Wall Street Journal for reporting on the same statement.
Trump’s attack on CNN was not the only threat he has lobbed at the media this week.
Standing at the White House podium in front of a room full of reporters the day before, Trump issued a chilling ultimatum: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’” The crime in question? A journalist — or perhaps several of them — reported that when an American F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran last Friday, both crew members were not immediately accounted for. The pilot had been rescued. The weapons systems officer had not. Trump said he would pressure the news media to assist in the investigation, saying that the source who shared the information with the journalist is “a sick person.”
The premise of the president’s outrage — that this story originated with a treasonous leak from within the government that jeopardized a sensitive rescue mission — falls apart almost immediately. The F-15E Strike Eagle is a two-seat aircraft that flies with a pilot and a weapons systems officer. When reports emerged that one crew member had been rescued, it did not require access to classified information to infer that the second was still missing. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the aircraft, or simply the ability to use Google and follow basic facts, could have arrived at that conclusion.
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In today’s information environment, that kind of inference happens constantly and in public. Images circulate online. Flight patterns are tracked. Communities dedicated to open-source intelligence piece together fragments of information in real time. By the time traditional news outlets publish a story, much of the underlying reality is already visible to anyone paying attention. Journalists who cover aviation, defense and foreign policy were drawing that exact conclusion at the same time as Reddit users.
The story seems to have first appeared on the Israeli media outlet N12 and in an Axios piece by reporter Barak Ravid, who cited an Israeli official and a second source with knowledge of the incident. But the underlying fact — that there were two people on the plane — required no source inside the Pentagon to divine. If a reporter confirmed what was already evident with a source inside the Pentagon, that is not the same thing as exposing classified operational plans. Verification is not leaking. Trump collapses that distinction because it serves his broader objective. In his framing, any confirmation becomes a betrayal, and any reporting sabotage. This is the logic of a regime that believes the government’s right to control information supersedes the public’s right to receive it.
Trump insists that the reporting put the rescue mission at risk, arguing that it alerted Iran and incentivized efforts to capture the missing officer. But the crash itself was not a secret… The idea that a news report transformed the situation into something uniquely dangerous stretches credulity.
Trump insists that the reporting put the rescue mission at risk, arguing that it alerted Iran and incentivized efforts to capture the missing officer. But the crash itself was not a secret. Iranian forces knew they had shot down an American fighter jet. People on the ground would have known something had happened. The idea that a news report transformed the situation into something uniquely dangerous stretches credulity.
Even more glaring is the hypocrisy embedded in the president’s own conduct. While condemning journalists for allegedly revealing sensitive information, he volunteered details about the rescue operation that military officials themselves hesitated to disclose, including that 155 aircraft — bombers, fighter jets and refueling tankers — were involved in the mission. When asked whether such specifics should remain confidential, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he’d “love to keep that a secret,” but his commander-in-chief brushed past that caution, readily offering the information anyway. “I’ll keep it a secret, but it was hundreds.”
Trump’s threats against journalists come amid a long-running battle between the Pentagon and the press corps assigned to cover its activities. After the Department of Defense instituted a new policy that required outlets to commit to only reporting information officially sanctioned by the government, dozens of Pentagon reporters — including those representing Fox News — opted to forfeit their press credentials. A judge recently sided with a legal challenge spearheaded by The New York Times and ordered the Pentagon to reinstate the passes of certain reporters. The Defense Department responded by saying it would instead relocate media offices to an “annex” outside the Pentagon.
The president has spent years laying the groundwork for this kind of confrontation with the press. As early as 2017, he reportedly urged then-FBI Director James Comey to consider jailing journalists who publish classified information. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump escalated his rhetoric, at one point fantasizing aloud about reporters being shot. Shortly after winning the election, Trump ordered Senate Republicans to kill a popular bipartisan bill to protect press freedoms that would have prevented federal law enforcement from seizing journalists’ records or forcing the disclosure of confidential sources. Shortly after taking office, former Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed a Department of Justice policy that had protected journalists from being subpoenaed for their confidential sources. (In response to revelations that during Trump’s first term, the department had secretly obtained or attempted to obtain records from at least nine journalists in connection with leak investigations, the Biden Justice Department prohibited the practice of secretly subpoenaing journalists’ phone and email records.)
With no federal shield law in this country, the Trump administration has already taken action against Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, whose Virginia home was searched by the FBI in January after she was accused of sharing “national security information” with a journalist. At the time, Bondi said the department was acting “at the request” of the Pentagon.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s warning to journalists should be understood for what it is: not an impulsive outburst from a man upset about a story, but the activation of a system deliberately built to punish and suppress independent journalism. His threat to jail journalists is not just an attack on the media. It is an attack on the principle that the public has a right to know what its government is doing as it escalates a war the American people do not want.
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