| | | Fraidy-Cat at the Pentagon
Maureen Dowd
nytimes.com
It is a truth generally acknowledged that Pete Hegseth is a muttonhead.
But I come not to bury the self-proclaimed “secretary of war,” rather to praise him.
He is going to spur some superlative Pentagon coverage. Because nothing gets a bunch of reporters going like being forced out of the building where they work and being told they aren’t allowed to do their jobs.
The Pentagon has said it will deny credentials to reporters who seek information that has not been approved for release. Hegseth already cut off access to large swaths of the Pentagon to reporters without escorts.
Journalists have walked the Pentagon’s halls since its opening in World War II. They could stake out Jim Mattis, a defense secretary in President Trump’s first term, when he picked up his clothes at an in-house dry cleaners and have an off-the-record chat as he walked back to his office, shirts slung over his shoulder. They might bump into the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Pentagon Starbucks and have a conversation that could turn into a story.
Pentagon officials liked it because they could clock what the reporters were working on, and the reporters liked it because they could get tips.
Mainstream news outlets have generally been careful, responsible, sometimes even overly deferential, about covering our military and handling sensitive information.
This crackdown on reporting supposedly would protect such information, even though the secretary himself personifies the motto “loose lips sink ships.”
He was embarrassed by the revelations that the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been mistakenly added to a chat about classified war plans on Signal, and that Hegseth had shared details of strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal chat that included his wife and brother, and that Elon Musk had been invited to a briefing on top-secret plans in the event of war with China.
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