The cable-news circus would have you believe a righteous moral panic is underway, but the conversation on Megyn Kelly’s show with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke exposed what working Americans already suspected: the press is far more interested in a gotcha headline than in sober facts. Megyn’s program walked viewers through the competing narratives and reminded the country that anonymous sourcing and eagerness for scandal do not equal proof.
The Washington Post’s blockbuster claim — that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth verbally ordered U.S. forces to “leave no survivors” during a September strike on a suspected drug-smuggling vessel, and that a second strike killed two men who survived the initial attack — detonated across the media landscape. That report relied heavily on unnamed sources, and it instantly became the vehicle through which many outlets sought to topple a law-and-order policy aimed at protecting Americans from the poison trade.
Within days the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command pushed back with a public update reaffirming that the strikes are part of Operation Southern Spear and insisting the actions were lawful and called for by SOCOM in the field. The Defense Department has repeatedly said the operations were vetted by military lawyers and are designed to interdict narcotics headed for the American market. The public deserves clarity, but it also deserves not to have policy shredded on the basis of anonymous leaks alone.
International bureaucracies predictably piled on, with the U.N. human rights office urging the United States to halt such strikes and calling for investigations into alleged extrajudicial killings. That self-righteous hand-wringing sounds hollow to families in Ohio and West Virginia whose communities are being hollowed out by fentanyl and cartel poison. There is a moral difference between lecturing America from Geneva and actually doing something to stop the cartels’ murder machine.
Legal scholars have understandably raised hard questions about what constitutes lawful force at sea, and anyone who cares about the rule of law should want those questions answered. But the important distinction the Washington Post and other outlets gloss over is that law and due process are not served by breathless coverage that treats every anonymous leak as gospel. The law demands investigation; modern media demands impeachment by innuendo.
That was the thrust of the National Review voices on Megyn’s show: Lowry and Cooke pushed back against the media’s reflex to sensationalize and to weaponize anonymous sources to score political points. They pointed out that officials on the ground — and the chains of command that actually run operations — have context the press routinely ignores, and that Democrats and NeverTrump critics alike are embracing a narrative before all facts are in. The administration’s denials and explanations deserve equal weight, not reflexive dismissal.
Meanwhile, the administration insists these operations are aimed at protecting American lives and have tangible results: Southcom has publicly tallied kinetic strikes and casualties tied to the campaign, arguing that decisive action at sea is one of the few tools left against transnational drug cartels. If the choice is between cautious interdiction that leaves the cartels free to flood our cities with fentanyl and bold action that risks messy headlines, patriotic Americans know which side they’re on.
If Washington is to investigate, let Congress investigate both the facts of what happened and the wider policy failure that allowed cartels to export death to our shores in the first place. The hand-wringing elite who sanctimoniously demand restraint should explain why open borders and soft-on-crime policies have left so many families grieving. The American people can handle accountability; what they will not tolerate is a media class that sacrifices objectivity to score political points while the carcasses of their communities pile up.
