Reporting on national security matters, irrespective of which country you are in, can be a hazardous affair. In police states, the consequences are self-evident to the brave who report on their misdeeds. The paid off toadies do not count. In liberal democracies, there are also consequences for giving the game away on the national security state. The toadies, in that case, pose themselves as insiders rather than sycophants of moulded consensus. They are the blessed recipients of approved wisdom, officially or otherwise. In this cosmos of regulation, even those who disagree with official policies can be given a gentle airing.
This is particularly so in the United States. Go through the media stable of any US broadcasting network or major paper, and you find them, many former apparatchiks of the imperium’s various agencies, tugging their forelocks to empire. As Julian Assange found to his personal cost, to give the game away by publishing the national security material of Freedom’s Land is to invite prosecution and conviction under the Espionage Act of 1917, despite having never set foot in the country, let alone having US nationality.
It was therefore a rare event to see press outlets get stroppy in unison to proposals by the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that reporters agree to a new policy on reporting material from the department. In a document boasting the Pentagon’s new name of “Department of War”, journalists are informed that “DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.” Those reporting outside approved channels could be designated “a security or safety risk” and have their credentials withdrawn.
While policy acknowledges that journalists receiving and publishing unsolicited classified or sensitive information from government sources are “generally” protected by First Amendment freedoms, it takes issue with soliciting “the disclosure of such information” or encouraging Pentagon staff “to violate laws and policies concerning the disclosure of such information”.
In a post on X, Hegseth called access to the Pentagon “a privilege, not a right.” It is certainly a privilege he has been trying to trim, having implemented rules earlier this year limiting the movements of reporters through the Pentagon without approved escorts. In September, he issued a tart reminder that press members were “no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules – or go home.”
The Washington Post’s executive editor Matt Murray is of the view that the proposed policy undercuts the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment “by placing unnecessary constraints on gathering and publishing information.” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, stated his magazine’s opposition to the restrictions. “The requirements violate our First Amendment rights, and the rights of Americans who seek to know how taxpayer funded military resources and personnel are being deployed.” In his statement, National Press Club President Mike Balsamo thought Hegseth’s latest measure “a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the US military.”
Each of the major broadcast networks issued a joint statement on October 14 saying they would refuse to subscribe to the policy. “Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues.” This was a dictate “without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.”
While the policy speaks to President Donald Trump’s ongoing mania with limiting the access of Fourth Estate outlets he dislikes, the question not being asked is how useful the Pentagon press ever was to begin with. Does having a pass to the mandarins of military power really ensure accuracy, let alone accountability, in terms of reporting? Or are such passes of greater benefit to those who grant them in the first place? Press conferences and meetings speak to management, control of the narrative, and reining in tales of misadventure. Interrogating foolish policies, misspending and acts of imperial mischief are rarely the preserve of the mainstream stable. They publish on the herd-like assumption that nothing they write will warrant exclusion from the club. Doing so also preserves conscience and cowardice, both being, as Oscar Wilde thought, much the same thing. (Conscience, he goes on to say in The Picture of Dorian Gray, is merely “the trade-name of the firm.”)
Lethal to the craft is the dual policy of keeping members of the Fourth Estate in the officers’ orbit when in Washington and embedding them with combat troops when overseas, an approach that has sterilised the prospects of steely, valuable reporting. The effectiveness of this move by the Pentagon is evident in the view of NPR’s Tom Bowman, who mourns the loss of a Pentagon pass he has held for 28 years. “For most of that time, when I wasn’t overseas in combat zones embedding with troops, I walked the halls, talking to and getting to know the officers from all over the globe, at times visiting them in their offices.”
Bowman shows no awareness that proximity to power, much like holding it, corrupts. His Pentagon years were marked by “finding out what’s really going on behind the scenes and not accepting wholesale what any government or administration says.” There is never that inkling of doubt whether such behind-the-scenes discoveries were intended. He recalls running “into an officer” in the department who revealed that the fall of Baghdad to US-led forces in 2003 was not an evident sign of decisive success. This less than revelatory account is not a patch on any of the magisterial reports from coal face scribblers such as Patrick Cockburn, who made a point very early on of mastering Middle Eastern affairs by actually being there. He could tell long before any bloodhound in the Pentagon could that Washington’s foolish and destructive presence in Mesopotamia was doomed to failure and lasting consequences.
Perhaps now, with their cherished passes surrendered or revoked, the moaning establishment hacks might finally get some decent reporting done on the national security state in all its wondrous, spanning ghastliness. Hegseth may well have done them an enormous favour while scuttling an important platform of influence.
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