 Over the weekend, we almost went to war with Iran. We were this close, Donald Trump had his finger on the trigger, but he decided not to pull it at the very last minute. Think about how crazy, how terrifying that is. Now the reason, reportedly, why Donald Trump had a change of heart is because he was talked out of it by Tucker Carlson of Fox News, of all people. The world that we live in, like it's stranger than fiction, reality is literally stranger than fiction. Now Trump tweeted about this and he said, we were cocked and loaded to retaliate last night on three different sites. When I asked how many will die, 150 people, sir, was the answer from a general. Ten minutes before the strike, I stopped it. Now he also explained that he didn't think, you know, bombing these three different sites was a proportionate response to them just killing one of our robots. Now he's correct about that and whatever led him to make that decision, I'm glad it happened. However, this is a very unstable time, not just in American politics, but internationally. If we have someone that came that close to bombing Iran, war with Iran, sorry, you shouldn't be in that position. There was, you know, a meme of Donald Trump giving himself a medal of honor or something like that because, you know, he was going to bomb Iran, but then he didn't. So he's trying to make it seem like he's the hero. No, you're not the hero. You don't get to congratulate yourself for putting out a fire that you started. You don't get to do that. Tensions would have never been this high had you remained in the Iran nuclear deal. But because you decided that you didn't like a deal because Obama is the one who negotiated it, then you got us to this point gradually. So we were that close to war. That is incredibly difficult to fathom, but nonetheless it happened. And part of the problem, part of the reason why we don't see more reluctance from our leaders to get involved in these types of conflicts is because mainstream media does not push back. So I'm going to play an interview for you. And this is a clip from Face the Nation with Bernie Sanders. Now Bernie Sanders is going to say everything right pretty much here. But what I want you to really pay attention to is the framing here, because the framing is what I'm concerned about. This is a failure on behalf of media. Take a look. I want to ask you about Iran. Was President Trump's decision this week to call off that strike the right one? It's like somebody setting a fire to a basket full of paper and then putting it out. He helped create the crisis, and then he stopped the attacks. The idea that we're looking at a president in the United States who, number one, thinks that a war with Iran is something that might be good for this country. He was just doing a limited strike. Just a limited strike? Oh, well, I'm sorry. I just didn't know that it's okay to simply attack another country with bombs, just a limited strike. That's an act of warfare. So two points. That will set off a conflagration all over the Middle East. If you think the war, as I do, the war in Iraq, Margaret, was a disaster. I believe from the bottom of my heart that the war of war with Iran would be even worse, more loss of life, never ending war in that region, massive instability. We're talking about, we have been in Afghanistan now for 18 years. This thing will never end. So I will do everything I can, number one, to stop a war with Iran. And number two, here's an important point. Let's remember what we learned in civics when we were kids. It is the United States Congress under our Constitution that has war-making authority, not the president of the United States. If he attacks Iran, in my view, that would be unconstitutional. So if you are commander-in-chief, you will ask Congress for permission before you engage in any kind of military action. There are sometimes emergency situations, okay, that I understand. Defensive actions. Yeah, if you're attacked immediately, you have to respond. Nobody believes that we are in that type of emergency situation with Iran right now. Now the sad part is that I only found out about this clip because Bernie Sanders was being attacked. He was the one being attacked because he was apparently rude to that reporter because he scoffed at the question that she asked. If you don't scoff at that type of question, you're not a reasonable person. She said, oh, it was just a limited strike. I mean, what she did there was try to justify it. A limited strike, that was an act that would have been an act of war. Can you imagine if Iran did a limited strike on the United States? Or if North Korea did a limited strike on the United States? We wouldn't take that very lightly. We would consider it an act of war and rightly so because that's an act of war. Now the thing about the CBS News reporters is that they must be trained to say things like this. They are trained presumably to play devil's advocate. But the problem is that if you're going to play devil's advocate for something like war, you need to make it explicitly clear that that's what you're doing. You're playing devil's advocate. You're saying, you know, or you should say rather, what do you say to people who say X, not just, oh, it was just the limited strike, because even if maybe that reporter was playing devil's advocate, it still makes you look really stupid because it makes it seem like you're doing pro-war apologia, which the mainstream media should not be doing. The mainstream media's job is to educate people. Tell them objective facts about war. If we go to war, this is the cost. This is the monetary cost. This is the human life cost. This is what would happen in terms of destabilization. Here's experts one, two and three to tell us why this would be a disaster. But they don't do that. They're doing pro-war apologia. This is why this book, Manufacturing Consent, is one of the best books because it explains how corporate media is almost worse than state-sponsored media outlets, right? You know, these authoritarian regimes, they have state-run outlets, and we all condemn that because that's authoritarianism. You need, you know, an objective, independent media. But I mean, we have corporate media under our capitalist system, and we effectively get a press that is collectively more loyal to the state than some state-run media outlets in authoritarian regimes. It's absurd. Now, what the reporter then goes on to do is try and go Bernie Sanders into saying that Iran is at fault here. But thankfully, Bernie Sanders doesn't take the bait. When you said it was President Trump's fault that this situation involved, don't you hold Iran responsible? Yes, I do, too. But what Trump has said, he said during his campaign, Trump has been extraordinarily antagonistic with Iran, whether or not he wants to bring down their government. I don't know. I think people like John Bolton may very well want to do that. Trump is the person you remember who withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. So he has been, without any, I don't think anyone disagrees, extraordinarily provocative toward Iran and loving the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. That's not the role that we should be playing. How would President Sanders resolve this? I'll tell you how we would. Look, this is a tough issue. And I'm not saying it's anyone can easily resolve it. This is what I would say. I would say to Iran, I would say to Saudi Arabia, I would say to Israel, I would say to the other countries in that region. You know what? You have been at war in one way or another for decade after decade after decade. And by the way, your wars have not only impacted your own people, they have impacted the United States to the tune of trillions of dollars and 5,000 lost lives. We will play a role in bringing you together. And if you need economic aid, we will provide the economic aid. We will provide the resources. But we're not simply going to give more and more weaponry to Saudi Arabia, to Israel. We're going to try to bring people together for what I admit, Margaret, I admit it, will not be easy. But that's what the role of, I think, the US should be, not simply to be part of the Saudi war efforts in the region. So again, everything that Bernie Sanders said there was great. He talks about how it's Donald Trump who has been antagonistic. He talks about how John Bolton wants regime change in Iran. But the reason why I played that clip for you is because it really demonstrates how the media is incorrectly portraying the situation. Don't you hold Iran responsible? Isn't it unfathomable to think that the United States could ever be wrong? I mean, we are the aggressors. We violated the Iran deal. We pulled out and reimposed sanctions. Iran came to the table, and they agreed to a deal that nobody thought they would have agreed to because it was so strong. And then we pull out inexplicably once we get a new president, and now we're reimposing these sanctions. How do you frame that as anything but the United States being the aggressor? Objectively speaking, you report the facts. This is how the United States unilaterally got us to this point by poking and poking. Do they even stop to ask, why were we flying so close to Iran to begin with? We may or may not have been in international airspace. Maybe we crossed into Iranian airspace, but regardless, why are we over there if not to intimidate Iran? So that's a huge problem with media. They're not portraying things accurately, and they go out of their way to make sure that the United States is portrayed in the most charitable way possible. You know, we're never the bad guys. If we do something, it's good by default because we're the good guys. Our intentions are pure, of course. No, that's not actually the case. But getting to CBS, they constantly do things like this, and they don't realize that it is crushing their legitimacy. Because if you'll recall a couple of months ago on CBS This Morning, I critiqued a CBS reporter who said something as equally idiotic while presumably playing devil's advocate when it comes to healthcare. Take a look. The president wants his party to be the party of healthcare. Unfortunately, apparently what he means by that is throwing 32 million Americans off of the health insurance they have. But isn't that what your plan would do, too? Because you've been moving them into Medicare for all? I mean, if they have insurance right now. Wait a second. President's plan and what he has supported throws 32 million people off of healthcare. No alternative. We provide healthcare to every man, woman, and child in this country. I think maybe slightly different concepts. We guarantee healthcare to all. He throws 32 million off of healthcare. Slightly different. Off of the affordable care out. And they have no alternative. That reporter also from CBS framed Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all plan, which extends healthcare to 100% of the population as people losing healthcare. So it's probably the case that these reporters aren't that stupid. I hope, right? I hope that they're not that dumb. But what they're probably doing is they're taking orders from higher ups. They're probably trained to play devil's advocate in order to appear more neutral. I don't know what the reason is, but here's what I do know. The media's job is to educate people. Give us the information that we need to make informed decisions. In life at the voting booth, your job is to educate. And this clip is evidence that they are failing to do their job because if the media was doing its job, millions of Americans would be in the streets right now screaming about war with Iran and what a disaster that would be. But because the United States isn't being portrayed correctly, because it seems as if Iran is the aggressor. Well, then of course, any and everything that we do is justified because again, we're the good guys. This is a problem with corporate media. This is a problem with corporate media. And we've got to point it out because this is absolutely dangerous. When it comes to war, there's no room for you to play devil's advocate, especially if you're not going to be explicitly clear about the fact that that's what you're doing. If that's what you're doing. But your job is to educate. Now do your job before you get us all killed.