AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
As war expands in the Middle East, the stakes appear sky-high. Covering a war stands among the most challenging and most charged assignments faced by journalists. It's often hard to get at the facts. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik says they're especially hard to come by at the moment, and he joins us now to offer his analysis. David, good morning.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Good morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So let's start with a broad view. What are you seeing as you look at the coverage of the war?
FOLKENFLIK: Let's start with the seat of power. For all of his trashing of the press, President Trump has given interviews to so many major news outlets making his case, and to a lot of those that he's trashed over the years - to CNN, to The Washington Post, to The New York Times, The Atlantic, on and on, endless. And yet the president has really not given any major address to the public or to the nation, to the world to set out a specific rationale for the decision to take out Iran's leadership. The president hasn't really indicated what he expects, what he wants to follow. And there's all this uncertainty about whether the president and his cabinet want to call this a war or not. And I think we've seen that's left the news media scrambling to kind of discern what the rationale is rather than an after-the-fact justification for going in so hard.
RASCOE: What are some of the challenges specific to covering this conflict that's just over a week in?
FOLKENFLIK: Let's acknowledge the restrictions here. Iran is run by an extremely authoritarian regime. It is, for the first time since the outbreak of these hostilities, allowing in a reporter from an American news outlet and will be closely monitoring. Similarly, in Israel, there were censorship rules, and they're going to be closely monitoring to make sure news outlets don't give out information of how their missile defense systems work, for example.
And then there's the hostility from the U.S. The administration's giving out little information. When it does, it's often outdated. And let me give you a flavor of that hostility. That first reporter for a U.S. outfit to get to Iran, it's Fred Pleitgen. Here's an excerpt of one of his reports from Thursday.
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FRED PLEITGEN: I'm taking a quick break for a coffee along the way. We've been driving for several hours. There's a couple of things that we've noticed. Number one is that, first of all, all the shops are open. All the shops are really well-stocked, even with fresh things, like, for instance, fruits and vegetables.
FOLKENFLIK: So there's zero controversial here. It's really pretty bland, a standard little travelogue setting the scene before Pleitgen and his crew get closer to the action. And even so, a deputy State Department official called that straight up pro-Iran regime propaganda. CNN says Pleitgen was simply bearing witness without agenda and with context.
And our colleague Michele Kelemen asked the State Department, why call that propaganda? It told her that news outlets should confirm their reporting with the U.S. government before presenting to the public, and that sounds like a reasonable approach, but that doesn't make any sense here. There are no U.S. diplomats in Iran. There are no U.S. government personnel within miles of that gas station.
Maybe the best sources for the quality of produce at a truck stop in northwestern Iran were to be found inside the Trump administration. But to me, it looks as though the administration was throwing a brushback pitch, making clear it would be quick to try to discredit reporting it didn't like.
RASCOE: Tell us more about that. Like, what have news outlets reported that the administration may not want out there?
FOLKENFLIK: And let's be clear. You know, I've heard from conservative friends in recent days saying, gosh, everything that the press is throwing up there is just designed to discredit Trump and make him look bad. But there are examples of news outlets doing real reporting to try to figure out the facts. Take The New York Times. It did independent forensic work to verify that U.S. missiles did strike a school for girls that was close to an Iranian army base in the town of Minab on February 28. And examining similar satellite footage, NPR made similar determinations. The Iranians say that more than 160 people were killed, though that's hard to independently verify. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says, simply, we are investigating, but no real facts there.
A second one, you know, the White House had claimed that Iran would soon have missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland and that was among the reasons cited for the attacks. But The New York Times, Reuters and CNN subsequently reported that U.S. intelligence agencies said - actually said quite a different thing, that it would be many years before Iran could have that kind of capability.
RASCOE: And, you know, conservative media and social media influencers play such an important role for the administration. What reaction have you seen from them?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I think we've seen a surprisingly strong schism. Fox, mostly friendly - Secretary Hegseth, of course, was previously a Fox News star. But there have been real divides. You've seen folks like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly on one side. Tucker Carlson even reportedly went to the White House to try to talk Trump out of bombing Iran. And on the other, you have Ben Shapiro, Laura Loomer, Mark Levin and others who have been strongly supportive of this idea and of taking on Iran. Those media figures who have wrapped themselves in this America First banner are having to decide whether to change costumes as a president who promised that there would be no more foreign wars decides to go to war.
RASCOE: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. David, thank you so much.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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