The government monstrosity formerly known as the Department of Defense and recently renamed the Department of War is cracking down on media coverage, announcing new rules and restrictions on journalists.

The Secretary of the new Department of War, Pete Hegseth, announced Friday that members of the press operating inside the Pentagon, must submit to significantly tighter rules for access and reporting.

Those who don’t play by the new rules will lose access.

The new rules require all journalists to work through established public-affairs channels, display press credentials at all times, and accept that possession of unauthorized information — even if it’s non-classified information — may result in the loss of press credentials.

The policy, laid out in a memo released Friday, follows restrictions introduced earlier this year.

In May, Hegseth, in the name of national security, directed the Pentagon to impose tighter controls on press activity after a series of leaks he said endangered bombing operations in Yemen.

Hegseth has it backwards. If leaks are happening that compromise national security, then he should be cracking down on his own government employees and contractors who are doing the leaking, not on the press.

Hegseth was a member of the media himself before he took the job of Defense Secretary, but he clearly learned nothing from that experience. He has essentially banned journalism at the Pentagon. The implication of his new rules is that reporters covering his massive bureaucracy are only allowed to repeat what’s said by a government official speaking at an official press conference or regurgitate the contents of a government press release. Sorry but that’s not journalism. That’s stenography.

Sorry Pete, but I’m not with you on this one. You’ve done some good things as head of the Department of Defense, such as eliminating DEI. But this isn’t good. It’s the type of thing that happens when a nation is no longer confident of itself and shuts down transparency.

Any Pentagon correspondent who doesn’t turn in their resignation this week in response to this outragious attack on the First Amendment is no journalist at all. A true journalist couldn’t work under these smothering “rules,” because they provide no space for the actual craft of journalistic investigation and independent analysis.

When you take away the ability of the press to talk to sources of its own choosing, when you take away its ability to assemble facts independently of the government authorities, you strip it of its entire purpose. It becomes the state-run media. The official government organ. Like Pravda was for the old Soviet system.

By the way, the self-proclaimed “Peace President” taking it upon himself to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, explains everything about why Hegseth made the changes he made and is cracking down on press freedoms.

The new name reflects a federal government not interested merely in national defense but one that is positioning itself to be permanently at war. A permanent war state. In a time of war, nations are far less tolerant of dissent, and far less tolerant of inconvenient facts. As the old saying goes, and it really is true, “the first casualty of war is the truth.”

https://leohohmann.substack.com/p/journalism-no-longer-tolerated-at