Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is stifling the Pentagon’s channels for public information and cutting off avenues for accountability as U.S. forces deploy on missions of dubious legality that are fraught with potential danger.
President Donald Trump has sent federalized National Guard troops to multiple U.S. cities since the summer and threatened to send troops to many more. The U.S. military is massing forces in a potential precursor for regime change operations in Venezuela and recently began the extrajudicial killing of individuals on offshore vessels that officials claim, without evidence, are engaged in drug trafficking.
The public has a right to know about these deployments, which raise grave legal and constitutional questions.
But on Wednesday, Defense Department press secretary Sean Parnell announced “the next generation of the Pentagon press corps,” which he described as “over 60 journalists, representing a broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists.”
That a government official trumpeted the debut of the new people who will be covering his department is a signal of just how much that press corps has been corrupted. Its new members are a motley crew predominantly composed of right-wing influencers and Trumpist outlets. Representatives of organizations like The Gateway Pundit and Infowars will replace what Parnell termed the “activists who masquerade as journalists” who turned in their passes last week rather than accepting his department’s new restrictions on the press.
Credible defense reporters will continue striving to provide the public with information and insight on Pentagon operations. But they will do so in the face of Defense Department leaders who clearly prefer working with politically sympathetic conspiracy theorists and propagandists. The “new” Pentagon press corps’ coverage will likely range from pliant to sycophantic as its members seek to comfort their MAGA audiences.
The press isn’t the only target of the Pentagon’s campaign against transparency: Hegseth, driven by an apparent urge to limit the effectiveness and volume of oversight, has also launched an overhaul of the inspector general complaint system to curtail its investigations, and he issued a new policy that prevents military leaders from talking to members of Congress without prior approval.
Together, it amounts to an information silo around the Pentagon as U.S. troops deploy abroad and at home.
Hegseth lacked anything resembling traditional qualifications for his post when President Donald Trump appointed him, having instead spent years working for Fox News. And while his most extensive work experience is at a media company, he was by no means a reporter. A right-wing host of the network’s weekend morning show, Hegseth shared the contempt for journalists that permeates much of the network’s programming, urging readers of his 2020 book to “disdain, despise, detest, [and] distrust” the news media.
As defense secretary, Hegseth has effectively made that comment the mission statement for the department’s press relations. He has mocked and derided reporters and torn apart his senior staff in search of media leakers. Soon after he took office, the department punished national news outlets by kicking them out of their Pentagon work spaces and handing them off to right-wing publications. A few months later, new rules banned reporters from much of the Pentagon unless they were escorted by an approved member of the department. Hegseth and his department are historically lax in sharing information with the press and thus the public, as NPR reporter Tom Bowman, a 28-year veteran of the Pentagon press corps, noted:
Now, we’re barely getting any information at all from the Pentagon. In the 10 months that the Trump administration has been in office, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given just two briefings.
And there have been virtually no background briefings, which were common in the past whenever there has been military action anywhere in the world, as there has been with the recent bombings of Iran’s nuclear facilities and of boats off the coast of Venezuela alleged to be carrying illicit drugs. In previous administrations, Defense Department officials — including the acerbic [Don] Rumsfeld — would hold regular press briefings, often twice a week. They knew the American people deserved to know what was going on.
But limiting access for reporters and starving them of information was apparently not enough.
Last month the Pentagon rolled out strict new guidelines for the press corps which warned that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” and threatened to strip access from anyone who violated that stricture. On the October 15 deadline to sign their acknowledgement of the new guidelines, journalists for dozens of outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal instead turned in their press passes and left the building en masse.
“Signing that document would make us stenographers parroting press releases, not watchdogs holding government officials accountable,” Bowman noted.
But for Hegseth, that was the point — he wanted stenographers rather than watchdogs, and following the establishment of the new guidelines and the ensuing walkout, that’s exactly what he’s gotten. All the reporters who might consider themselves watchdogs have left the building. Even right-wing outlets Fox, Newsmax, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, and the Washington Examiner drew a line and refused to sign the new guidelines to retain their access.
Those that did sign are, almost by definition, the type of willing administration lapdogs Hegseth wanted covering him from inside the building. They are, at times by their own admission, woefully incapable of doing investigative work that holds him to account — but they have the skills to promote his talking points and puff him up to their right-wing audiences.
Hegseth and the MAGA right enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. When his nomination appeared in jeopardy following allegations of misconduct that included sexual assault, workplace drunkenness, and financial mismanagement, Hegseth benefited from the furious support of MAGA influencers. Upon taking office, he then offered access to the likes of Pizzagate enthusiast Jack Posobiec and presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump to burnish his image.
A rundown of those who will now make up the Pentagon press corps — either rare holdovers willing to sign the guidelines or new outlets that announced their involvement after Parnell’s announcement — suggests that one hand will continue to wash the other. The “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” features a host of representatives from MAGA outlets, many of which publish deranged conspiracy theories, Trumpist hagiography, or extremist commentary.
They include:
Hegseth’s restocking of the Pentagon press room with shills and sycophants aligns with similar efforts underway at the White House, as well as an administration-wide war on journalism which includes defunding public media; suborning once-critical media owners; aiding sales of outlets to friendlier ownership; and filing lawsuits that punish news outlets for reporting that displeases the president.
