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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt came out swinging on Thursday, demanding that ABC News immediately retract a report that claimed Iran was planning a drone attack against California. The story, which spread like wildfire across social media and cable news on Wednesday, was based on a single FBI bulletin sent to local law enforcement — a bulletin that ABC conveniently failed to mention was built entirely on unverified intelligence. Leavitt didn’t mince words: ABC News provided “false information to intentionally alarm the American people.”
Here’s what actually happened. ABC News reviewed an FBI bulletin that warned California police departments about the possibility — emphasis on possibility — that Iran might attempt to launch offensive drones against the West Coast in retaliation for American military strikes. The report sounded terrifying. It was designed to sound terrifying. But what ABC left out of their breathless coverage was the single most important word in the entire bulletin: unverified. The intelligence behind the warning had not been corroborated, confirmed, or validated by any credible source. It was a raw, unvetted tip that the FBI circulated as a matter of routine caution — not as an actionable threat assessment.
CBS News, to their credit, reported what ABC wouldn’t. Multiple U.S. and state law enforcement and intelligence officials told CBS that “there is no credible intelligence underpinning the bulletin.” One official was blunt, making clear this was not a verified threat. So why did ABC run with it as though Iranian drones were already in the air heading for Los Angeles?
Because fear sells. And because anything that makes the current geopolitical situation look more chaotic, more dangerous, and more out of control serves a very specific narrative that certain media outlets have been pushing since the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran on February 28th. The legacy media has spent years trying to convince Americans that strong foreign policy leadership leads to catastrophe. They want you scared. They want you doubting. They want you to believe that standing up to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism was a mistake.
Leavitt laid it out plainly on social media: “They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip. The email even states the tip was based on unverified intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY?” She then added, in all caps for emphasis: “TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.”
This is not the first time ABC News has played fast and loose with the facts to generate panic and undermine public confidence in the Trump administration. The legacy media has become so consumed by its adversarial relationship with this president that basic journalistic standards — like accurately representing the sourcing of a story — go right out the window when there’s an opportunity to stoke fear. Do they even care that real people in California read that headline and genuinely feared for their families?
For those of us who have watched the mainstream media’s credibility collapse over the past decade, this latest episode is sadly unsurprising. From the Russia collusion hoax to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story to the endless parade of “anonymous sources” pushing narratives that later fell apart, the pattern is unmistakable. The corporate press is not in the business of informing the public. They are in the business of shaping perception, and if a few million Americans lose sleep over a fabricated drone threat, that’s just collateral damage in the information war.
What makes this particular instance so egregious is the context. The United States is in an active military engagement. Tensions with Iran are real and serious. American servicemen and women are in harm’s way. In that environment, publishing an unverified threat as though it were confirmed intelligence isn’t just irresponsible journalism — it borders on dangerous. It undermines public trust in actual security warnings. It creates panic where none is warranted. And it hands propaganda victories to our enemies, who can point to American media and say, “Look, even their own press says they’re vulnerable.”
The Bible tells us in John 8:32 that the truth shall set you free. But the inverse is equally true — lies enslave. They enslave us to fear, to confusion, to division. The American people deserve a press that tells them the truth, even when the truth is less dramatic than the fiction. What ABC News did this week was not journalism. It was fear-mongering dressed up in a news ticker, and Karoline Leavitt was absolutely right to call for an immediate retraction.
The question every American should be asking isn’t whether Iran has drones pointed at California. The answer to that is no. The question is why one of the largest news organizations in the country thought it was acceptable to tell you otherwise.
Sources: The Gateway Pundit, Karoline Leavitt on X, CBS News via Jennifer Jacobs
Providence watches over the bold.
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