WASHINGTON — 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 Donald 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 chair 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’s 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.
And Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News anchor, does not like how the media covered him as he ascended — utterly unqualified and looking like the third lead of a cheesy spring-break movie.
As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote at the time, a trail of documents indicated that Hegseth was dumped from prior leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior and drinking on the job.
His tenure at the Pentagon has been marked by chaos as he pushed out several top Black and female leaders and derided “fat troops” and “fat generals.”
Knowing he’s in over his head, Hegseth has grown more paranoid and resentful — qualities we need in the supervisor of a nearly trillion-dollar budget, supervising troops and weapons all over the world.
When I covered stories in Saudi Arabia, officials attached minders to us. But imposing such undemocratic, restrictive protocols at the Pentagon makes it seem as if we’re run by tin-pot dictators.
Trump can seem more open with reporters. Attention is his oxygen, after all. But he continually maligns the media.
And there’s a creepy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feel to the press corps at the White House now as the perches of legacy media get filled with MAGA ringers — like the two White House “reporters” from Mike “MyPillow” Lindell’s “news” network.
One of the pillow reporters, Cara Castronuova, was among the handful of media representatives allowed in with Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine on Friday. Castronuova’s penetrating “questions” consisted of gushing over Trump, who “stuck out his neck” for a Middle East peace deal, and chiding Zelenskyy for wanting the weapons that Trump had suggested he might give Ukraine. “As he said,” Castronuova tartly told the Ukrainian president, “we need our Tomahawks, too.”
Trump dodged Vietnam with his bone spurs excuse, and he has called the Iraq War “the single worst decision ever made.” So, somewhere, under all that bombast and desire to be praised rather than challenged, he knows we need a vibrant Pentagon media corps to ferret out the truth when our leaders are lying to us to prolong or start wars.
America’s greatest fiascoes happened because there wasn’t enough sunlight cast on them. As a chastened JFK told The New York Times’ managing editor, Turner Catledge, after the Bay of Pigs, “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”
After reporters — including those from Fox News and Newsmax — refused to agree to Hegseth’s 21 pages of conditions, the Defense Department’s official X social account trolled them with a puerile meme.
Hegseth, immature and unconfident, cannot accept that a free press is integral to democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Hopefully, the defense secretary who will take over when Hegseth is undone by the press for his ineptitude and un-American diktats will understand that.
Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.
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