Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is stifling the Pentagon’s channels for public information and cutting off avenues for accountability as U.S.
Matt Gertz at MMFA:
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.
[...] 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.
DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth’s newly-enacted directive for Pentagon press corps has led to the decimation of the legacy Pentagon press corps.
Replacing those who refused to bend to Hegseth’s farcical directive are far-right outlets who’ll pump out propagandistic “reporting” such as The Gateway Pundit, The Federalist, OANN, and Lindell TV.