Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has largely banned military officials – including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force – from speaking with Congress unless they coordinate with a centralized office that reports to him.
After dozens of veteran reporters rejected the Defense Department’s prohibitive new press policy, and handed in their media badges this week, the only journalists left with credentials to enter the Pentagon were a mix of freelancers, foreign media members and staffers from MAGA-boosting outlets.
Dozens of print and broadcast journalists walked out of the Pentagon Wednesday in the wake of nearly every American news organization – including Trump-friendly networks Fox News and Newsmax – refusing to follow Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s media restrictions.
These are the suck-ups who signed on to Hegseth’s restrictions. Any so-called “news” from these suck-ups should be treated as Pentagon-approved propaganda:
… only 15 people out of hundreds of credentialed reporters had signed the new press pledge.
Of those signatories, two are from the pro-Trump cable channel, One America News; one is from right-wing website The Federalist; and another is from ultra-conservative newspaper The Epoch Times.
The remaining 11 reporters include freelancers for foreign-based organizations and a couple of little-known independent sites that appear to publish their work solely on social media.
“A reporter for the Turkish newspaper Akşam signed the agreement, as did three individuals from the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency and two Turkish freelancers,” the Post reported. “Other signers included a reporter for The Australian, a News Corp-owned Australian paper; an Afghan freelancer; and three lesser-known operations, AWPS News, the India Globe and a blog called USA Journal Korea.”
Additionally, two members of the Jordanian TV network Al Taghier signed an older version of the policy, which had been scrapped and revised amid negotiations and pushback from the Pentagon Press Association and other press advocacy groups.
Prior to a swarm of defense reporters symbolically exiting the Pentagon together Wednesday afternoon, after handing in their badges and cleaning out their desks, only one media outlet had publicly agreed to the restrictive pledge – One America News.
https://apnews.com/article/chicago-immigration-crackdown-judge-d5414dffbbd9380f95211c2c18d653d2
If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail, again!
The bottom line is that no significant self-respecting college or university is going to sign on to your stupid “compact”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/maga-moral-collapse-groupchat/684594
