Karoline Leavitt's Unfair Criticism of CNN's Coverage

Much like her boss, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt likes to play the hits. Bashing mainstream media networks like CNN for relentlessly negative coverage of the Trump administration is a tried-and-true strategy on the right—and conservatives often raise some fair points about media double standards.

But some of this is just griping. While it's true that the mainstream media covers President Donald Trump very negatively, the media also covers everything with a powerful negativity bias. This first became evident to me while watching local news, where stories of killings, assaults, and abductions always generated attention that was disproportionate to the likelihood of any of these things occurring. In a very literal sense, that's because the news consists of things that happen, rather than things that don't happen. "No One Died" is not a news headline; "Someone Died" is. This remains true even if "No One Died" is the more common state of affairs. Most non-journalists have probably heard about this phenomenon, which is often colloquially known as if it bleeds, it leads.

Excessive coverage of negative news can warp people's perspectives on how likely it is that bad things will happen. When I was much younger, throughout the '90s and '00s, Americans were living through a massive drop in violent crime, which declined by about fifty percent after 1992. Most people were unaware of this at the time, and partly due to local news coverage, mistakenly believed crime was getting worse.

That's a long way of saying that while I understand where Leavitt was coming from on Wednesday, she was way off base in her criticism of CNN's Kaitlan Collins, who pressed Leavitt to defend Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's blasé dismissal of American casualties from retaliatory Iranian strikes.

???? NOW: Karoline Leavitt UNLOADS on CNN when Kaitlan Collins defames Hegseth, falsely claiming he "complained" about those reporting on our fallen troops

"That is NOT what the secretary said and you know it"

"The press ONLY wants to make the president look bad…ESPECIALLY CNN"… pic.twitter.com/vU4fu8W3Sd

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 4, 2026

Reporters and commentators who note that American servicemen are dying as a result of Trump's decision to authorize Israeli-U.S. strikes on Iran are not playing some gotcha game. Those lives matter and Trump officials should be confronted by the reality that they are now dead. It's not CNN's fault that Declan Coady, a 20-year-old member of the U.S. Army Reserves—who was born well after 9/11—has lost his life.

We are heartbroken to learn that Declan Coady—a well-loved and highly dedicated Drake University student studying information systems, cybersecurity, and computer science—was confirmed to be among the six U.S. service members killed in Kuwait on Sunday. He has bravely served in… pic.twitter.com/UyBoP4jNMB

— Drake University (@DrakeUniversity) March 4, 2026

The truth is that the administration's decision to take out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials has invited attacks on American troops all over the Middle East. Trump, Hegseth, Leavitt, and the others are welcome to offer justifications for why the U.S.' strategic aims in Iran are significant enough to render this loss of life acceptable. But they can't be mad when they get asked this question—particularly since the administration has done a terrible job of explaining the rationale for war against Iran in the first place.