And the media message, as always, is that Donald Trump is losing. It isn't true.

Former President Bill Clinton aide de camp Mark Penn has long been an outspoken critic of his fellow progressives.

Penn called out media outlets this week for misleading coverage about the war in Iran and, big surprise, President Donald Trump.

Mr. Penn issued a blistering screed on X this week:

“Iran Coverage — The headlines abound: Iran Regime doing well, in control,” began Penn. “Trump under pressure to end war Khomeini son just as tough as Father US responsible for missile on school. One headline after another essentially featuring Iranian propaganda as the news.”

“Where are the headlines: 50 Iranian ships sunk Iranian military assets,” Penn wondered. “Destroyed Leadership tries to put on good showing despite internal chaos. Khomeini appointment creates hereditary theocracy. War plan progress unprecedented.”

“The press is a drumbeat of negativity favoring the Iran regime,” wrote Penn. “It’s puzzling at this point how any success is buried. The reality is likely the regime is being pummeled on all sides and has no ability to provide for its people. Maybe it can put on a good show for another week or two but its leadership is under immense pressure. But that’s not what the American public is getting from mainstream media.”

Mark Penn’s complaint about Iran coverage is not really that mainstream outlets are inventing facts out of thin air. It is something both more subtle and, in some ways, more insidious than that. 

His point is that the frame of the coverage keeps telling the public the same story: Noble Iran is hanging tough, evil Trump is under pressure, the regime is stable enough, and whatever military gains the United States and Israel are making somehow do not quite count as political success. That matters, because in modern media the headline is not a label slapped on the story after the fact. The headline is the story for millions of people.

Reuters tells readers that “Iran bets on endurance.” The Washington Post says the regime “maintains its grip, despite devastating losses.” The Wall Street Journal says Iran’s leadership is still in control and able to fight. Plenty of people notice what Mark Penn has noticed. The emphasis is not on what Iran has lost. It is not on the extraordinary scale of the U.S.-Israeli campaign. It is not on the destruction of military assets, degraded launch capacity, or the elimination of commanders. The emphasis is on survival. On continuity. On resilience. On the idea that, somehow, the real story is that Iran is still standing.

Or rather, that Donald Trump is still losing. Considering how often the press declares Donald Trump on the losing side of this or that issue, as often as “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump” he, somehow, keeps winning.

Now, to be fair, the underlying coverage is often more nuanced than the headline. Outlets have reported that the U.S. military says it has sunk more than 30 Iranian ships. It has separately reported cracks emerging inside Iran’s leadership as the regime reels under bombardment. 

CBS reported Trump saying the war was “very far ahead of schedule,” and Reuters noted that same claim as well. In other words, the factual building blocks for a very different public narrative are right there in the coverage. A reader who gets deep into the article may come away with a more complicated picture: Iran is taking enormous damage, the regime is under pressure, and the battlefield balance is not remotely close.

But that is exactly where the problem lies. News organizations know perfectly well that a huge share of the audience never reaches paragraph eight, much less the final third of the piece where the context usually lives. 

A Penn State-led study of 35 million Facebook news links found that more than 75 percent were shared without anybody even clicking through to read them. That is not a side note. That is the media environment. 

In a culture like that, the headline is not just the first impression. It is often the only impression. So when the headline says Iran is enduring, Trump is squeezed, and the regime is holding on, that becomes the wider public’s working understanding of the war.

This is why people who agree with Penn do not usually argue that the press is literally hiding military success. They argue something more sophisticated: that success is being demoted. It exists, but as subordinate information. It is tucked beneath the more emotionally powerful frame of danger, stalemate, blowback, civilian harm, uncertainty, and political risk for Trump. And because Trump is the central political character in the story for American readers, the cumulative effect is to make every development feel like a referendum on his stress level rather than on Iran’s losses. That is how you can produce coverage in which the United States and Israel appear to be hitting thousands of targets, sinking ships, fracturing the ruling elite, and still somehow end up with a public mood that says: yes, but Trump.

There is also a language problem here. “Maintains its grip.” “Still in control.” “Able to fight.” Those phrases may be defensible in narrow descriptive terms, but they also have a flattening effect. They blur the distinction between a regime that is stable and a regime that is merely not dead yet. 

They make hereditary succession and coercive wartime discipline sound like ordinary resilience. They turn an embattled theocracy clinging to power amid heavy losses into a noble lesson in persistence. That kind of language does not have to be coordinated propaganda to have a propaganda-like effect. It simply has to steer the reader toward the takeaway that the regime remains fundamentally viable and Trump’s political gains remain uncertain.

It’s not that every reporter is dishonest. Not that every fact in the mainstream press is false. But the emotional and political packaging of the war consistently points in one direction. The press does not have to erase success to minimize it. It only has to make sure success never becomes the main headline. And in an era when most people skim, scroll, share, and move on, that is more than enough to shape what half the country thinks it knows.

The other half, is getting its reporting elsewhere.

Which is probably why President Trump’s positive approval rating stuns progressives.

It’s actually up since the start of the U.S. military action against Iran.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)