Six days ago, as she prepared her airlifted exit from Kabul, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward declared that the United States’ effort to evacuate thousands of Afghans was doomed to failure. “I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single US plane take off,” she reported. “How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.”

Ward seemed to speak for most journalists who lined up for days to condemn President Joe Biden and to predict a perilous future for the Afghanistan capitol. (Talk of “mass murders” and U.S. embassy employees being taken hostage were in the media mix.) Wildly eager to portray the U.S. troop withdrawal as a “humiliating” and “disastrous” “fiasco,” the media were sure the story was going to get much worse.

Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun Media