The year is 1981, and conservative writer Robert Elegant, in an essay about the role of journalism in the Vietnam War, claims: “The press was instinctively ‘agin the government’—and, at least reflexively, for Saigon's enemies.”

The year is 1998, and the neoconservative magazine Commentary, in a book review about a collection of reporting from the Vietnam era, concludes that the largely negative coverage of the war was written from “the vantage point of those for whom an American defeat would spell moral victory, even a victory for morality itself.”

The year is 2004, and as the United States deepens its brutal occupation of Iraq, conservative personality Ann Coulter promotes her new book by asserting: “The media so wants to take [President] George [W.] Bush out so that John Kerry can get in and surrender for America.”

The year is 2026, and right-wing media figures are pulling the same act, as President Donald Trump’s unprovoked and unpopular war on Iran, carried out jointly with Israel, staggers toward the close of its second month.

Since virtually the moment Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on February 28, their allies in conservative media have scapegoated mainstream news organizations as enemy sympathizers. In this telling, journalists, often artlessly clumped with Democratic politicians, are “rooting” against the United States and for Iran. Right-wing pundits frequently lob these allegations without even the pretense of providing evidence, relying instead on the longstanding conservative myth that the “liberal media” is conspiring to harm so-called regular — which is to say MAGA-coded — Americans.

These attacks are especially egregious given that there is no shortage of legitimate critiques of top newspapers’ coverage of the war, which often adopts the U.S. government’s preferred framing. (The same was true for Vietnam — numerous academic studies have found that the press was in fact overly deferential to the U.S. government and military, not the opposite.)

It should be no surprise, then, that right-wing media would continue to work the refs and try to maintain that institutional deference as soon as the bombs began falling.

Scapegoating the media for “rooting” against the United States

Animosity toward the press is reflexive in right-wing media, ready to be instantly deployed like the 82nd Airborne. And the response from the start of Trump’s war with Iran was rapid indeed.

On March 4, Newsmax host Rob Finnerty offered what would soon become a familiar and jumbled analysis in the conservative press, equating the media and the Democratic Party.

“Democrats in the media and Democrats in Washington are rooting against Donald Trump and they are rooting against America, to the point where they are now hoping that America will lose this war after just four days,” Finnerty said.

“They are rooting for Iran, and they’re saying it out loud,” he added.

A guest on presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s Fox News show made almost the exact same argument three days later.

“It’s almost like some folks in mainstream media and maybe even some Democrats are almost rooting against the United States, pointing out our weapons stockpiles are low and just pointing out how everything is potentially going wrong,” said Matthew “Whiz” Buckley.

“It doesn’t matter how many missiles they have, we can outlast them,” he added. “We have great defense companies — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, all these other companies that are going to ramp up production."

On March 12, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, a major war hawk, criticized media reports that found a U.S. missile was likely responsible for killing at least 175 people at an elementary school in Minab, Iran.

“All of this brings us to the tremendous media focus on what appears to be the accidental bombing of a girls' school in Iran in the early hours of the war,” Shapiro said. “This has been the chief point of pushback by the legacy media and again, members of the grievance party, meaning Democrats and the horseshoe theory right, many of whom are just openly rooting at this point for Iran — openly rooting."

During an interview with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on March 18, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, another die-hard supporter of attacking Iran, asked: “How much more difficult does it make this war when you have the media not reporting, but taking a side seemingly against the mission?"

“Well, it’s disheartening, Brian, to see American reporters and American news publications rooting against our troops and the success of their mission,” Cotton replied. “Really the only people who are taking the side of Iran here are American liberals — it’s very disheartening."

On March 27, Fox host Sean Hannity appeared on the PBD Podcast and referenced articles in The Economist, Foreign Policy, and Politico that he characterized as critical of the war. “Why did they root against our country?” he asked, adding: “For crying out loud, can you just hope even if you disagree that it works?"

The talking point held strong as Operation Epic Fury entered its second month. After airing a montage of critical coverage of Trump’s prime-time speech about the war in early April, Fox News host Lawrence Jones said: “Rooting against the country — I think it’s shameful right now."

On April 6, former Trump senior adviser and Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway similarly and oh-so-reluctantly wove the media and the Democratic Party into a single anti-American tapestry.

“I just can't help but feel — I don't want to feel this way but there is no other way to feel — so many people in our press, so many people in the Democratic Party are rooting for us to fail,” she said.

As news of a ceasefire was breaking the next evening, Newsmax guest Christian Whiton enumerated his list of various winners and losers of the war to that point.

“This looks like a huge win, not just for President Trump, but for the United States of America, for Israel, for Arab allies,” Whiton said. “The losers are the Democrats, the mainstream media, the Europeans, and everyone else who was rooting for Iran."

Elsewhere at Newsmax, Newsbusters senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino argued, “It’s kind of the entire media’s whole deal, is they are anti-American."

“I mean, we’re talking about this Iran war,” he continued. “Our media are rooting against us in this war because they don’t like the president."

On April 21, conservative streamer Dave Rubin accused the press of hoping for a breakdown in the U.S.-Iran negotiations.

“CNN, of course, and New York Times and all the usual suspects are doing this over and over again, almost to the point where it seems like they're rooting for Iran,” Rubin said. “And again, I think you can argue that a good portion of the D.C. elite, a good portion of the mainstream media, the entire Democratic Party, I think they actually are rooting for a failure here by America."

For these pundits, the press is once more “agin the government.” Let it be acknowledged that conservative media have learned at least one lesson from previous wars.

“We should have learned that nonsense from Vietnam”

Published in 1977, Michael Herr’s Dispatches chronicled life and death on the ground during some of the bloodiest years of the Vietnam war. The animosity toward the press that Elegant and Commentary would later memorialize was already apparent to Herr and his more astute colleagues in their day-to-day dealings with the officer class.

“[S]ooner or later, all of us all of us heard one version or another of ‘My marines are winning this war, and you people are losing it for us in your papers,'" Herr wrote.

That sentiment, the myth of the perfidious press, lives on, not least of all in the words and actions of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a former Fox News personality, even if no one would confuse him for a reporter — and in his boss, perhaps the president most hostile to the First Amendment in modern U.S. history.

The conservative pundits attacking the press in this war have learned all the same, wrong lessons as did the officer corps that Herr wrote about. Sometimes they even almost admit it.

Communicating perhaps more than he intended, ex-cop and Fox News contributor Paul Mauro said Trump’s contradictory rhetoric about the goals of the Iran war had triggered a “meltdown from the collective legacy media.”

“Get on the team here,” Mauro added. “You can gripe later.”

“How does it feel if you are out there facing the enemy, and you know that half of the homefront is saying you’re not supposed to be doing this, we don’t have your back” he continued. “We should have learned that nonsense from Vietnam."

Former Trump White House press secretary turned Fox host Kayleigh McEnany agreed, calling it “a lesson learned."