Some US media are cheerleading Trump’s Venezuela raid. That’s not their job | Margaret Sullivan

If you believe the early public opinion polls, Americans are uncertain about last weekend’s raid on Venezuela and the seizure of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.

But many in the media seem to be trying to move that wavering needle to approval.

That’s especially true on the right, of course, where Fox News is leading a full-on cheering squad.

Even the right-leaning podcaster Megyn Kelly, a former Fox host herself, said the cable network’s early coverage was like watching Russian propaganda.

A great deal of the mainstream media seems reluctant to question Donald Trump’s stunning move. CBS News, under new editorial leadership, is leading that pack. Its Tuesday-night broadcast was practically Fox Lite, including a too-cute montage of AI-created images of the US secretary of state and former Florida senator, Marco Rubio, and these words from anchor Tony Dokoupil: “It is a sign of how Florida, once an American punchline, has become a leader on the world stage … Marco Rubio, we salute you.” The segment was meant to be lighthearted, but it struck many as tone-deaf, or just plain irresponsible, under the circumstances.

To their credit, influential global outlets like the Associated Press, Reuters, the Guardian, the Washington Post and the New York Times are providing serious news coverage. I was impressed, for example, by a Post piece that explored the growing despair on the streets, headlined “Fear grips Caracas as a new wave of repression is unleashed in Venezuela”. Detailing the crackdown that included the detention of journalists, the arrests of civilians and the spread of armed gangs, it stood in sharp contrast with a Post editorial that immediately cheered “one of the boldest moves a president has made in years” under the glowing headline: “Justice in Venezuela.”

Hanging over the more serious coverage, for some observers, was the troubling report that the Times and the Post knew about the raid in advance and held back publication at the urging of the Trump administration. The rationale was that they did so to avoid endangering American troops.

Was such cooperation the right move?

I talked to several ranking editors at news organizations, who hesitated to say that they would have done things any differently without knowing much more about the circumstances, the readiness of a verified story and, especially, the timing.

Ben Smith of Semafor, known for a propensity to publish rather than hold back – as with the unverified Steele dossier when he was running BuzzFeed News – was one of these.

“If you knew months in advance the US was considering ground action, that is obviously a story, and I think various people did report that,” Smith told me. “If there are helicopters in the air and your reporting would get them shot out of the air, I don’t think any editor would publish that.” (The Times, as recently as late December, reported that military action in Venezuela, involving army Delta Force units, could be phase two following the American attacks on Venezuelan boats.)

More generally, though, an almost admiring feeling pervaded the early coverage.

“Daring” was the word of choice on broadcast and cable news, including on the generally sober-minded ABC News; and the New York Times explored the “virtually flawless” mission in a front-page Sunday piece that nodded to, but did not emphasize, whether the raid was legal. The Times seemed to adjust course later in the week, as with its Wednesday edition of its newsletter the Morning, which featured David Sanger’s analysis of the emerging Trumpian logic that he can “claim resources that, in his view, America cannot live without. He’s already setting up a parallel argument for Greenland.”

Some of the strongest critical coverage came from singular voices, such as that of the former labor secretary Robert Reich, who aptly observed the throughline from the Trump-inspired insurrection on 6 January 2021 to the Venezuela raid – and to whatever unaccountable power plays lie in the future.

“A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup five years ago to his capture of Nicolas Maduro last weekend,” he wrote in his newsletter. “Both were lawless. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.”

I was glad to see the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner’s quick reflexes in publishing an interview on Saturday with Oona Hathaway, the president-elect of the American Society of International Law and a prominent Yale law professor. The headline, “The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation”, was a rare piece of mainstream-media candor in the first days.

But let’s face it. A lot more people are likely to see overall soft coverage, especially on TV.

As of last weekend, we’re in a radically new phase of American history. Some media coverage is helping to convey that frightening truth.

But if you merely saw the “daring mission” headlines or caught the fun-filled “we salute you” paean to Rubio, or believed the Fox News cheerleading, you might not know it.