“All news media run by the [Chinese Communist] Party must work to speak for the Party’s will and its propositions, and protect the Party’s authority and unity.“ — General-Secretary Xi Jinping of the Chinese Communist Party addressing journalists in February 2016.
Blatantly undermining the First Amendment, War Secretary Pete Hegseth is breaking his oath of office to uphold the Constitution. His new rules governing journalists assigned to cover the War Department do nothing to make America great again. On the contrary, they further fester the Washington, D.C., swamp by putting self-interest before the public interest.
The new rules require journalists to sign a document agreeing, among other things, not to report on material not officially approved for release. With the exception of the One America News Network, all other news outlets are refusing to sign the document. This includes the Washington Examiner and other conservative outlets such as Newsmax and Fox News.
“We do not plan to sign the Pentagon document. The Washington Examiner does not sign agreements with people we cover in our reporting in any other area, and we do not plan to make an exception in this case. The Department of War will set its rules, and we will continue to provide our readers with strong independent news reporting,” Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon said in a statement.
The refusal to kneel before Hegseth’s halfwitted diktat is understandable. For a journalist to accept these new rules would be to neuter themselves of their raison d’être: supporting the public interest in accountable government. Hegseth is attacking the First Amendment requirement that the government not abridge the freedom of the press.
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Addressing President Donald Trump on Tuesday, Hegseth claimed that his rules would mean journalists “can’t just roam anywhere you want. It used to be, Mr. President, that the press could go anywhere, pretty much anywhere in the Pentagon, the most classified area in the world. … It’s commonsense stuff.”
Hegseth is being deeply disingenuous.
It is absolutely untrue to say that journalists could simply wander around the Pentagon, entering offices without approval, before these rules. It is absurd to suggest that journalists could sneak into any of the Pentagon’s many classified rooms, which the government refers to as “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities,” or SCIFs. These areas have been and will remain restricted to journalist access.
Instead, wearing their accredited IDs, reporters have until now been allowed to roam Pentagon hallways for the same two reasons that tens of thousands of War Department employees with wildly varying security clearances and foreign military representatives, including from non-allied states, have been allowed to do so. First, because the Pentagon is big and you need to walk between different locations to attend different authorized meetings. Second, because the corridors themselves do not constitute classified spaces.
Hegseth’s rules are the equivalent of a hospital requiring doctors not to talk to patients, even if patients attempt to engage with them first. Both the patient’s health and society’s interest in medical understanding would suffer greatly from such an approach.
What the defense secretary is really trying to do here is to shield his control over the most powerful organ of the U.S. government from uncomfortable media coverage. Hegseth wants the personal right to transmit classified information outside of authorized channels, as he plainly did during the “Signalgate” saga, while obstructing journalists in their public interest reporting. There are few places involving more important concerns of public interest than the Pentagon.
After all, this building is a grand intersection of vast amounts of money and vast amounts of power to take life. Without robust reporting here, we would know too little about the state of our security, the conduct of war, corruption scandals worth many billions of dollars, and government activity on innumerable other issues ranging from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to UFOs.
The exigent public interest in accountable government underlines why journalists seek to develop both relationships with authorized government/military press officers and other government employees. If in a different domain and far less courageous manner, like U.S. Navy sailors, journalists are paid to find out what’s going on both at the surface and below the surface. The world’s greatest democratic republic is poorly served when the public must rely only on government press handouts.
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Where journalists are provided with classified or otherwise sensitive information, it is incumbent on the person providing that information to understand the consequences of his or her actions. And although not all do so, most journalists weigh their knowledge of classified information against the public interest of reporting that information.
My personal rule is that if U.S. lives or key interests would be risked, or a foreign adversary would gain outsize benefit from any reporting, the relevant information is better left unreported. But far too much government information is classified in order to avoid difficult questions. And sometimes, the public needs to know that a lot more is going on below the surface than is commonly understood. The healthy balance between public interest and national security can be struck, as I underlined in a recent piece on U.S. military deployments around Venezuela.
In turn, while Hegseth might believe he’ll benefit from going the way of the Chinese Communist Party on press coverage, Americans are poorly served by it.