On the first day of December, a new day dawned at the Pentagon.
Reporters who had spent years, sometimes decades, covering the U.S. military from offices and desks inside the world’s largest government office building were gone. In their place was a new crop of fresh faces, anointed by War Secretary Pete Hegseth as more truthful and trustworthy than the “fake news” legacy media.
“This is actually one of the craziest experiences of my life as a journalist,” gushed Heather Mullins, reporting from the Pentagon briefing room for LindellTV (Slogan: “Where Truth Lives”) — the media outlet created by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
“In prior years,” she said in a TV report posted on X, “new media, media like ours, was not allowed in this room.”
That was not accurate, and was one of many examples where the new government-approved press corps lacked the experience to recognize that the talking points they were being fed were not entirely true.
Until Hegseth took over in January, the Pentagon was arguably the most welcoming building for Washington journalists to cover.
Any reporter, from the smallest newsletter to the biggest TV network, could attend Pentagon briefings, even if they worked for foreign news organizations that were not exactly friendly to the United States. And they did not need a credential to do it.
Reporters could be cleared to park in the press parking lot, and a public affairs officer would be dispatched to escort them to and from the briefing room.
The Hegseth Pentagon was the first to ban specific news organizations from attending an on-the-record, on-camera briefing from the official spokesperson, which it did for Kingsley Wilson’s first and, so far, only briefing room appearance — staged for the benefit of the newbies.
“I would also like to take a moment today to welcome all of you here to the Pentagon Briefing Room as official new members of the Pentagon Press Corps,” said Wilson, who is ostensibly the Pentagon press secretary.
Wilson wasted no time going on the attack.
“Legacy media chose to self-deport from this building, and if you look at the numbers, it’s pretty clear why no one followed them. National trust in these mainstream media outlets has cratered to 28%, the lowest ever recorded,” she said. “The American people don’t trust these propagandists because they stopped telling the truth.”
In the 60 chairs set up for the “official” press were a who’s who of conservative influencers, including Laura Loomer, known to have the ear of President Donald Trump; former Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is accused of paying for sex, including once with a 17-year-old girl; James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, a sting operation against media figures and progressive organizations; Tim Pool, a Trump-aligned vlogger based in West Virginia who unknowingly accepted Russian funding for his YouTube content; Wade Searle of LifeSite News, a Canadian Catholic advocacy outlet; and Cam Higby of Fearless Media, who has over 750,000 followers on TikTok and over 400,000 on Instagram.
In an interview with the WNYC radio program On the Media, Higby parroted a ludicrous Pentagon narrative that the old school reporters ran rampant in the building, terrorizing military and civilian workers in their quest for classified information that would jeopardize U.S. mission and put the lives of American troops in danger.
“From what I understand, speaking to lots of people within the Pentagon, DoW employees, is that a very hostile work environment was created within the Pentagon by journalists who would walk about the building, camp outside of offices, harass people who leave their offices, burst their way into offices that they were outside of when somebody would open the door with their card,” Higby told host Micah Loewinger.
Here’s where I have to call on my 33 years of Pentagon reporting to assert that, to my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened remotely, and it certainly does not reflect the workplace culture I witnessed daily.
In my experience, Pentagon reporters who have workspaces in the building are uniformly respectful of boundaries and do not barge into offices uninvited.
The relationship between the military and media has historically been adversarial but friendly and courteous.
When asked for specifics, Higby could not name any names, but cited Wilson as the source, saying she complained about reporters “camping outside of her office and just perpetually ringing her bell to get answers about certain things.”
It’s true that Wilson’s office on the E-ring of what was once the “Correspondents Corridor” — a hallway where the contributions of a free press were honored — is behind a locked door, and the only way reporters can get in is by ringing a doorbell.
It’s also true that the job of the press secretary is, or was, to talk to the press and answer their questions.
“Americans at home want answers, and they deserve real journalists to be in this room asking the questions that Americans want to know,” Mullins said, “And we haven’t had that for a really long time.”
When the new, “improved” press got the opportunity to fire questions at Wilson, some were quite tame.
“If Nicolas Maduro leaves Venezuela today, what role will the Department of War have in a post-Maduro Venezuela?” Gaetz asked.
“The department has a contingency plan for everything. We are a planning organization,” Wilson said, in a standard Pentagon non-answer.
Some echoed Hegseth’s beefs with the media.
“My question is, does the Department of War plan on pursuing any sort of legal action against The Washington Post? What consequences will there be for lying to the American people?” Searle asked.
“It is frankly disgusting that the Washington Post would publish something that is so insanely false.” Wilson agreed, and then falsely said the New York Times “stepped in and corrected the record.”
The outlet added new details but did not contradict anything the Washington Post reported.
Loomer, who describes herself as an investigative reporter, asked about relations with Qatar, given that Trump has started the process of designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization.
“Will the Department of War still proceed with selling F-15 fighter jets to Qatar? How will they be able to train Qatari pilots at their air base in Idaho if Qatar is included in the designation?” she asked.
“The U.S. military has a longstanding partnership with Qatar, and we look forward to continuing that partnership at our airbase in Idaho,” Wilson answered.
“But given the fact that the Qatari royal family and Qatar itself is the biggest financiers, along with Turkey of course, the financiers of the Muslim Brotherhood, would that relationship and partnership be reevaluated?” Loomer pressed, to which she got another non-answer.
“I’m not tracking any reevaluation at this time, but again, the secretary really keeps national security top of mind,” Wilson said.
There was no “news” made at the briefing, and as any national security reporter worth his or her salt would tell you, there are few scoops to be had at a routine briefing. But it is a chance to get the administration’s policy clarified on the record.
The reporters who gave up their building access cards included journalists who reported to work at the Pentagon daily and spent their entire day there.
The credentials they turned in were not licenses to report. In America, we don’t license journalists. Anyone can be one.
But now that there’s no place to go, and no one to talk to except a handful of political appointees who believe the press is the enemy of the people, there is no real benefit to being there.
It’s doubtful that Loomer, Gaetz, Pool, or any of the other “new media journalists” will be spending eight hours a day, five days a week, sitting at a desk at the Pentagon, where there are no regular briefings and little if any access.
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And to be clear, while the Pentagon likes to say the old media left because they would not accept common-sense rules to protect classified or sensitive information, the real reason is that under the Hegseth policy, simply asking for information that was not preapproved for release is considered tantamount to “soliciting criminal acts.”
That’s not the way a free press works.
