“None of Hegseth’s predecessors, nor any of his fellow Cabinet secretaries, are doing anything like this, and it’s embarrassing. President Trump deserves better,” said Ullyot, a Marine Corps veteran who also served as a deputy assistant to Trump. “Hegseth should drop the Soviet-style restrictions, reopen the briefing room, and follow the lead of President Trump and every other Cabinet secretary by engaging regularly, confidently, and conversationally with reporters of all stripes.”
Critics include pro-Trump media personalities. “I’m MAGA, and I’m conservative, and I want this administration to succeed,” Gabrielle Cuccia told me. In May, she said, she was fired from her job as chief Pentagon correspondent at One America News after she criticized policies that restricted reporting on the department. She later explained that she had argued that the restrictions were “not based on any credible threat from the Pentagon media present every single day, but rather a growing desire to control how, and when, the public receives information.” She told me: “What does that say when we start to accept agreements in which a government is telling us what is approved to be spoken of and what’s not?”
Critics include Fox News, one of the president’s favorite networks and Hegseth’s former employer, which joined every major news network, both cable and broadcast, in refusing to agree to the new rules. In a joint statement, Fox and other news organizations said the policy “threatens core journalistic protections.”
“The policy was just unacceptable to folks,” said one Fox News editorial staffer. On the air, Bret Baier, Fox’s most prominent newsman, criticized the new rules in an interview with retired US Army general Jack Keane. Keane, a Fox analyst who worked in the Pentagon when Baier covered it as a correspondent, disputed the accuracy of Hegseth’s claims. “It doesn’t seem like the whole story is being told to our viewers here,” Keane told Baier. “What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story. That’s not journalism.”
