CNN Whines About ‘Unfair’ Criticism of Journo in Iran With Regime ‘Permission’

Nicholas Fondacaro
March 6th, 2026 4:54 PM

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CNN once again finds itself being the only American, and possibly western, news outlet to have one of its major reporters able to get behind enemy lines and embedded with a Middle Eastern country; with the expressed permission of its brutal and murderous dictatorship. If you’re having Deja vu it’s because we’ve seen this before when CNN sold their soul to operate in Iraq pre-2003. And in their so-called “Reliable Sources” newsletter, on Friday morning, CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter whined that the criticism was “unfair” and stemmed from “a misunderstanding of foreign reporting basics.”

“Just crossed the border into Iran. Will be reporting from here in the coming days,” senior international correspondent Fred Pleitgen announced in a March 5 post on X. In a later post he highlighted, “Poster‘s commemorating the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Northern Iran. Have already seen several similar ones.”

The tidbit that really tipped people off to something fishy with CNN’s on-the-ground access came in an X post from CNN’s main account where they admitted: “CNN is operating in Iran only with government permission.” An admission that accompanied other reports.

This obviously threw any notion that CNN was operating objectively out the window. The admission drew criticism from many corners, including from other media outlets and the Trump administration, which accused CNN of spreading “pro-Iran regime propaganda.”

“There has also been some misinfo about the circumstances of CNN correspondent Fred Pleitgen and photojournalist Claudia Otto's reporting from inside Iran,” Stelter gripped in his newsletter.

The bellyaching continued as Stelter argued that people were just too ignorant to know that foreign correspondents were just built different: “The criticism of Pleitgen is unfair and suggests an all-too-common unfamiliarity with the basic tenets of journalism. Foreign correspondents want to ‘go there,’ as that old CNN marketing campaign said, and tell the rest of us what's happening.”

He went on to praise CNN’s honesty with their discloser of permission: “CNN is also being transparent: Pleitgen's dispatches — like this one labeled ‘on the ground in Tehran’ — are accompanied by a note that ‘CNN operates in Iran only with government permission.’”

You don’t get points for doing the bare minimum.

The skepticism of CNN’s honesty with their reporting was warranted given CNN’s checkered past with getting permission to operate in Middle Eastern countries.

In 2003, former CNN executive Eason Joran penned a piece in The New York Times admitting that CNN intentionally looked the other way when it came to the atrocities being carried out by Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq, including the abduction and torture of one of their cameramen, all so they could keep their precious access:

Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief.

Jordan would also admit that he was privy to assassination plots told to him by Saddam’s sociopath son Uday, along with the torture, mutilation, and dismemberment of a CNN source.

“I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely,” the coward concluded.

That’s why people don’t believe you guys on this, Brian. If you were willing to sell your souls once, there’s nothing stopping you from doing it again.

It’s worth noting that in one of his reports, Pleitgen pointed out that “The shops are open and stocked with goods, and we see no state of panic anywhere.” Which radio post Erick Erickson pointed out, “In other words, the United States is showing it is not at war with the Iranian people.”

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