No. of Recommendations: 3
...and fails.
Natasha Bertrand is their ""reporter"" (<--- air quotes) for intelligence matters. At least that's her title. Her real job is to be a Deep State/democrat propagandist with work mean to affect the tenor of national politics. Some of her Greatest Hits include working with "Fusion" Ken Dilanian on the bogus Steele dossier and hyping the "51 intelligence experts" who falsely claimed that Hunter Biden's laptop had "All the hallmarks of Russian disinformation".
She came out with a breathless story that intimated that the airstrikes by US B-2 bombers on Iran's nuclear development site at Fordow caused limited damage. She cited anonymous officials in her reporting and this report was intended to blunt any wave of success.
Problem is...she didn't caveat her report, and it only took a few days for it to be debunked by several.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/06/26/cnn-stands-10...In an unsurprising move, CNN — which a jury found is literally fake news — is “stand[ing] 100% behind” the so-called “journalism” of one its biggest propagandists: Natasha Bertrand.
On Wednesday afternoon, the left-wing outlet issued a statement in defense of Bertrand amid criticisms the media hoaxer is facing over a recent report she co-authored about the U.S.-led strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Published on Tuesday, this “exclusive” contained anonymous claims about a preliminary defense intelligence assessment that these unnamed sources said shows the “strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities … did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months.”The problem with these breathless statements are that 1) they lack context about the equipment targeted 2) the weapons themselves and most damning 3) omitted key details about the report.
Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway has additionally reported that “multiple knowledgeable sources” have said “the intel assessment being bandied about specifically notes it was done the day after the strike, needs weeks’ more analysis, was not done in conjunction with other intel agencies, and was given a low confidence rating.”
But none of that has stopped CNN from rushing to Bertrand’s side. In its statement, the propaganda outlet said it “stand[s] 100% behind Natasha Bertrand’s journalism and specifically her and her colleagues’ reporting of the early intelligence assessment of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
“CNN’s reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence,” the statement reads. “We have extensively covered President Trump’s own deep skepticism about it. However, we do not believe it is reasonable to criticize CNN reporters for accurately reporting the existence of the assessment and accurately characterizing its findings, which are in the public interest.”Problem.
As has been pointed out, CNN didn't include the bolded stuff in their original report.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250624190617/https:/...The original report also noted
Instead, the impact to all three sites — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged, the sources said. That includes the sites’ power infrastructure and some of the aboveground facilities used to turn uranium into metal for bomb-making....which is completely wrong from a technical point of view, as we've discussed here. The very nature of these weapons are to create havoc in underground structures.
