Pete Hegseth’s press crackdown is backfiring

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has managed to ignite cross‑ideological media solidarity with his unprecedented attempt to silence journalists. 

Today, over 100 resident Pentagon press members who failed to sign Hegseth’s new policy, which restricts reporters to only publish information preauthorized by Pentagon authorities, are required to turn in their passes and vacate the premises. And in a remarkable act of repudiation, the U.S. press corps stands virtually united in defiance of the former “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host — even his former employer Fox News. 

“Well, we’re all standing in solidarity,” Fox News host Bret Baier told his audience after the passing of Tuesday’s deadline to sign the 21-page policy, adding, “almost all of us.” 

In what CNN’s Brian Stelter reported as “an impressive show of solidarity,” nearly every major U.S. news outlet — including conservative companies like Fox News, Newsmax and the Washington Examiner — refused to sign the Pentagon’s new press access policy, arguing it undermines the First Amendment. The Associated Press described the act of defiance from Fox News as “a significant step.” Only the right-wing One America News agreed to the new reporting stipulations from Hegseth, with one of the channel’s hosts, former Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, saying the pro-Trump outlet “is happy to follow these reasonable conditions.”

Hegseth’s changes have upended eight decades of norms and practices between the military and journalists, and buck over two centuries of American freedom of the press. After most journalists refused to follow the initial guidelines released in September, which warned that reporters may lose their press credentials for “soliciting” even unclassified information from federal employees, the Pentagon issued a revised version this month. “This latest version has escalated the threats more around the act of reporting itself,” one expert told Poynter. “Rather than this overt censoring of journalists, which was how the initial version appeared, it has morphed into this effort to intimidate both journalists and government employees as well.”

From the day he took charge of the Pentagon in February, Hegseth launched a war on the press corps in an effort to minimize embarrassing leaks and marginalize critics. Defense Department officials immediately restricted reporter movements, closing off particular hallways in the Pentagon to reporters and booting long-credentialed media outlets from assigned workspaces. 

But by suppressing ordinary access, Hegseth has pushed competing national news outlets to lock arms against him. 

“The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections,” reads a joint statement issued by Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News. “We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.” The Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and the Guardian have followed suit by refusing to sign.

“The proposed restrictions undercut First Amendment protections by placing unnecessary constraints on gathering and publishing information,” Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor, said  in a statement posted on X. 

“The public has a right to know how the government and military are operating,” wrote New York Times Washington bureau chief Richard Stevenson.

NPR’s Tom Bowman, who has covered the Pentagon for 28 years, publicly surrendered his own credentials in protest of the “unprecedented” policy rather than abide by the restrictions. The Pentagon’s own spokespeople rarely brief the press anyway, Bowman noted in an op-ed:  

​​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 Rumsfeld — would hold regular press briefings, often twice a week. They knew the American people deserved to know what was going on.

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The Pentagon Press Association and the National Press Club have issued strong public statements condemning Hegseth’s strategy as unconstitutional. 

“What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story,” ​​Retired General and former Vice Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army Jack Keane told Fox News on Tuesday. “That’s not journalism.”

When the Atlantic, the Post and the Times announced their opposition, Hegseth replied with an emoji of a hand waving goodbye. He also reposted a cartoon that depicted the Atlantic, which became embroiled in a dispute with Pentagon and White House officials earlier this year after editor Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group chat, as a crying baby.

Hegseth has defended his draconian clampdown by arguing that “Pentagon access is a privilege, not a right.” He posted a list on X of what he called “press credentialing FOR DUMMIES: Press no longer roams free Press must wear visible badge Credentialed press no longer permitted to solicit criminal acts.” But as veteran Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr pointed out, the press hasn’t been allowed full access to the Pentagon all year. 

“We knew not to — you don’t walk into the tank and the classified areas are off-limits,” Fox’s Baier made clear on Tuesday. “We obviously were always trying to get the story from different elements. And there was a freedom, but everybody had badges with them. At the White House, I never walked into the Oval Office or the Situation Room.”

Hegseth has long positioned himself as an ideological warrior against what he calls “woke decay.” Senior officials at the Pentagon have actively monitored staffers, pressing for proof that every member of the U.S. armed forces actually watched or read Hegseth’s Sept. 30 address to top generals, according to Zeteo. While the Pentagon was once a global leader on climate change mitigation, Hegseth recently declared there would be “no more climate change worship” in the military. Dismissing concerns as “climate change crap,” Hegseth banned Pentagon agencies from spending money on climate planning, ordered leaders to “remove all references to climate change and related subjects from mission statements” and requested $1.6 billion in cuts to “wasteful” climate spending from the department’s 2026 budget.

But effectively giving the Pentagon editorial control over what journalists can report appears to be a bridge too far. This is not a negotiation over access. It’s a foundational attack on journalism itself. The fact that even Trump-friendly outlets have balked at Hegseth’s demand should send the message to a wider audience that something deeply troubling is afoot.

The move is already backfiring. 

Rather than marginalizing the press, Hegseth has amplified its critical role in public debate. Even as he restricts the media, his ultimatum and the public showdown have increased coverage of the Pentagon’s policies. In effect, Pete Hegseth has handed the press the mic. Only now, journalists hungry for scoops will rely even more on off‑the‑record sources, clandestine communications and external whistleblowers. The policy may discourage some, but it doesn’t extinguish the incentive to find cracks in the Pentagon’s wall.