The nation’s biggest TV newsrooms scrambled on Saturday morning to cover strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran.
After weeks of threats from President Donald Trump, the United States and Israel launched a significant assault on at least nine major targets early Saturday, including Tehran, Tabriz, Urmia, Kermanshah, Qom, Isfahan, Shiraz, Minab and Chabahar, according to the New York Times. The outlet also reported that Israel targeted a gathering of Iranian leaders. Trump posted a video on Truth Social Saturday morning claiming that negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities and avoid war had fallen through, which led the nations to engage.
Kaitlan Collins, Wolf Blitzer and others led coverage for CNN at different times of the day. During Collins’ conversation with on-site correspondent Jeremy Diamond, he explained that the United States “focused largely on military sites and locations.” Israel also targeted key military resources, but was also “clear in taking responsibility for the strikes on senior Iranian leaders.”
“We have not heard the United States take any part of responsibility or credit in that effort,” Diamond added. “We’ll see whether or not that changes, should an announcement be made that, for example, the Iranian supreme leader has been killed, which we do not yet know at this stage. We do know that he has been targeted and so far it’s been described to us as purely the Israeli part of these strikes, not the United States, which has stressed so far a focus on military structures inside of Iran.”
Fox News tapped Bret Baier, among others, to cover strikes on Saturday morning. He sat down with Democratic Rep. Adam Smith to discuss the Trump administration’s intentions with the strikes, as well as what the next few days of conflict could look like. Rep. Smith described the situation as a “full-scale Middle East War” that is likely to go on for “several more days.” He also said “we are not clear” on what Trump’s intentions were with the strikes.
“Most of the talks have been about Iran’s nuclear program,” Rep. Smith said. “That raises all kinds of concerns about why this approach to deal with that nuclear program. But also, the President has talked about Iran’s ballistic missile program, and he’s frankly talked also about regime change. So I don’t know that he’s clearly stated that this is a full-on war for regime change, but it certainly seems to be that way.”
Rachel Maddow spearheaded coverage for MS Now for an hour, following stints by the “Morning Joe” team. Maddow was largely critical of President Trump, and warned that “the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not the kind of force that’s going to go poof.”
“If they do kill the Supreme Leader, which appears, maybe, to be what they tried to do earlier today, then what will happen?” Maddow said. “I mean, this isn’t Venezuela. There’s no vice Ayatollah who’s going to step in and take over the top job, except she’ll take calls from Marco Rubio. What will happen then? If you voted for Donald Trump for president because you believed the hype, that he was America first, that he was against foreign wars, that he was definitely against regime change, wars in foreign countries, well, again, good morning. I hope you slept well.”
While Tom Llamas will anchor a special edition of “NBC Nightly News,” Peter Alexander and Laura Jarrett led the morning coverage of the strikes for NBC. They were joined by Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, who claimed that the situation in Iran is “under control” and that the United States and Israel “failed to hit their targets.” He also faulted the United States for starting a negotiation to avoid conflict, “and then in the middle of the negotiation, attack.”
“We made big progress two days ago,” he said. “On Thursday, we had a very good meeting in Geneva, together with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and we were able to address serious questions related to Iran’s nuclear program. We obviously have differences, but we resolved some of those differences.”