For Pete Hegseth, the questions at a press conference are almost beside the point.
“I stand here today, speaking to you, the American people, not through filters, not through reporters, not through cable news spin,” Hegseth said Thursday at a Pentagon press conference on “Operation Epic Fury,” an opportunity to provide updates on military operations in Iran and to take questions.
“Yes, there are reporters in front of me,” he added, looking at the camera. “But they are not our audience today. It’s you, the good, decent, patriotic American people.”
The former Fox News host, who last week assailed the news media and spoke approvingly of Paramount’s David Ellison taking over CNN, accused “a dishonest and anti-Trump press” of downplaying progress and amplifying the costs of war because “they want President Trump to fail.”
It’s a press-bashing routine that has become commonplace in recent weeks at the Pentagon, but Hegseth’s broadsides are part of a broader war on the media that is only escalating as the administration grapples with weak polls and fissures in the MAGA media world over the conflict. The attacks on the press are sure to connect with Trump diehards, who overwhelmingly support the war, but it’s hard to see them moving the needle with Americans skeptical of the president’s handling of the conflict so far.
“The more Hegseth talks trash, the less relevant he becomes,” Thomas Ricks, a veteran military journalist and historian, told TheWrap. “From where I sit, it looks to me like he is not really part of running the war, and is more a cheerleader for it. But standing on the sidelines shouting may be all he is capable of doing.”
Cheerleading is what the Trump administration seems to expect from the media, and it’s not afraid to enact changes that provide a more sympathetic press corps.
The Pentagon enforced restrictions in October that prompted dozens of news outlets – from the Associated Press to New York Times, CNN to Fox News — to give up their full-time credentials. (Several of the questions Hegseth took Thursdsay were from conservative outlets, like Gateway Pundit, that filled the gap.) Over the last few weeks, Trump himself has called media treasonous over false claims of spreading misinformation and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has threatened broadcasters over their coverage.
The Trump administration’s messaging on Iran has been muddled from the start of the conflict. The president announced the U.S. and Israeli strikes through a video posted on Truth Social in the middle of the night, and then proceeded to offer a series of rationales through brief phone interviews with reporters, all before taking questions publicly. (Reporters have only kept calling.)
Trump has never been one for strict message control, a quality that helped him overtake staid Republican challengers a decade ago but has also led to a more chaotic governing style. The ramshackle nature of Trump’s communication during this latest global crisis brings to mind the early months of the COVID pandemic, when the president engaged in rambling news conferences, once suggesting that injecting bleach could fight the virus.
Unsurprisingly, Team Trump isn’t accepting blame, even in part, for the lack of clarity about what constitutes an imminent threat — and what the endgame is. Americans are understandably concerned with the country getting mired in a lengthy war a la Iraq and Afghanistan — and the resulting impact on gas prices, which are already surging, and overall costs of the conflict, as the Defense Department requests $200 billion more.
As Ricks noted, “We now find ourselves in a war of choice chosen solely by that president. No one knows how it will end. But wars generally surprise people, especially in how long they last.”
Taking it to the media
Trump has suggested news outlets face charges of “TREASON” for spreading fake videos depicting Iranian military success — despite there being “no evidence that mainstream U.S. media outlets promoted fake videos” of the USS Lincoln on fire, as CNN found, never mind Trump’s outrageous claim that the “Fake News” media is “working in close coordination” with Iran.
The administration’s assault on the media has gone beyond rhetoric. The Pentagon further clamped down this month on Stars and Stripes, the partially government-funded newspaper that has long independently covered the military.
Stripes ombudsman Jacqueline Smith told the Washington Post that a memo issued last week describing increased oversight “threatens Stars and Stripes’ continued editorial independence, and it does so at the detriment of the troops who rely on the newspaper for complete coverage and continued accurate coverage that is not propaganda.”
On Thursday, Stars and Stripes Pentagon reporter Matthew Adams said on X that his outlet “was not approved by the Pentagon to attend this press conference.”
Over at the FCC, Chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran coverage, which — even if unlikely, especially in the near term – only compounds the anti-media rhetoric with potential government retaliation on media companies. Trump endorsed Carr’s threat against “corrupt and highly unpatriotic” news outlets. Carr told the New York Post that he is encouraging television broadcasters to air more “pro-America” content ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday in July.
“This is far more than criticism. These are outright threats, particularly Carr’s,” said John Wolcott, who served as Washington bureau chief of Knight Ridder newspapers (later McClatchy) during the Iraq war. “The idea that [they] can use the power the FCC has over licensing the public airwaves to direct your coverage in ways that are favorable to the current administration is unprecedented.”
Wolcott won high praise for his team’s hard-hitting coverage of the Iraq war, raising early doubts about the Bush administration’s WMD case. The late Rob Reiner played Wolcott in “Shock and Awe,” his 2017 film highlighting the Knight Ridder reporters’ dogged efforts to expose the truth.
During that time, Wolcott recalled how there was some backlash from readers and advertisers given Knight Ridder’s more skeptical coverage of the Bush administration’s claims. Though Bush officials may have been unhappy with some coverage, he said, “we were never threatened by anyone in a position of power.”
What the Trump administration is doing, Walcott said, “is by far the most blatant attempt I can think of to control coverage,” adding: “This is dangerous stuff.”
Questioning the press’s patriotism
The word “patriotic” has been getting thrown around a lot by Team Trump since the start of the war with Iran.
Hegseth, at one point Thursday, addressed “the patriotic members of the press,” the implication being that other reporters are insufficiently patriotic.
Ricks, who covered the Iraq War for the Washington Post, and has written two books on the subject, “Fiasco” and “The Gamble,” said that “reporters should ask hard questions” and “officials should be prepared to respond to them.”
“Reporters should also witness what is going on in combat, and tell the American people what is being done by and to them. The closer a reporter gets to the front lines, the more he or she tends to be appreciated,” Ricks said. He noted that soldiers and reporters can build relationships when both are on the front lines.
Unlike the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which hundreds of journalists were embedded with the military, there is no comparable setup in the Iran conflict. While reporters aren’t on the ground with troops, they are seeking information from sources in the military, intelligence community, White House and Congress — and attending Pentagon briefings.
“A Marine general once pointed out to me the sign at the entrance to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort (S.C.) that has an image of a Marine jet and the motto, ‘The ‘noise’ you hear is the sound of freedom.,’” Ricks recalled. “I told him that I feel the same way about press conferences.”
It’s unlikely Pete Hegseth sees press conferences the same way.
