The War Department’s War on Media

The Pentagon’s new restrictions will bar correspondents covering the American military from covering the American military, as the Trump regime attempts to exert full-spectrum control over media.

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, September 30, 2025

It should be evident by now to anyone paying even casual attention that exerting full-spectrum control over American media is among the Trump regime’s most perniciously obsessive projects.

Of all the extra-constitutional messes this vulgar ignoramus is making, I count his assaults on media his gravest attempt to destroy what remains of American democracy and what little chance there may be to restore it.

There are all sorts of cases in point. President Trump has a citizen’s right to file lawsuits against various media — ABC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Paramount Global (the parent of CBS News) — but to call these anything other than an antidemocratic assertion of executive power is out of the question.

Lately there are the threats of Brendan Carr, the mad-dog chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to take licenses away from broadcasters whose reportage and commentary are not to Trump’s liking.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” saith Carr when he forced ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air (temporarily, it turned out) for a few utterly harmless remarks the late-night host made after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the influential conservative.

What a ridiculous comment from a ridiculous man, what a capricious display of authoritarian power. This is a war on media the Trump regime intends to wage on many fronts, to finish this pencil-sketch of the landscape.

What is to my mind the most portentous attack yet on media of all sorts and what little independence remains among the mainstream variety came a couple of weeks ago, when the Defense Department announced severe new restrictions on journalists covering the Pentagon.

To put the case simply, these rules will bar correspondents covering the American military from covering the American military.

My mind goes first to Jefferson’s famous remark in 1787, while serving as the young United States’ minister in Paris.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” he wrote to Edward Carrington, a prominent Virginian and a friend, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Taking the Pentagon’s new restrictions on their own terms and also as a harbinger, Trump and Pete Hegseth, his buffoonish defense secretary, appear intent on delivering Americans to that condition Jefferson warned against 238 years ago.

Turning his question another way, I remind readers of W.E.B. DuBois, Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers, the James brothers (William and Henry), and other critics of the American imperium as it emerged at the end of the 19^th century. There will be empire abroad or democracy at home, they asserted with a sort of desperate alarm, but Americans will not have both.

Considered in this context, Hegseth, with Trump’s evident approval, has just nodded in favor of this argument. Operating the late-phase imperium, Hegseth effectively advises Americans, requires the sequestration of power from public scrutiny.

The document announcing the Defense Department’s new restrictions on correspondents covering the American military runs to 17 pages; a covering letter signed by Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, describes it as “implementing the Secretary of War [sic] memorandum, ‘Updated Physical Control Measures for Press/Media Access Within the Pentagon,’ dated May 23, 2025.”

Note the date. By mid–May Pentagon correspondents had reported that Hegseth was using unsecured internet lines to conduct classified business and had brought his wife, brother, and personal attorney into a chat room where a top-secret aerial attack on Yemen was under discussion. A few days after that it was reported that he had invited Elon Musk to a briefing on potential war plans against China.

This guy had a lot of stupidity and incompetence to cover up. And the restrictions Hegseth authorized in May, detailed in the memorandum dated Sept. 18 and due to come into effect over the next few days, reek of the sort of revenge — against Democrats, against the universities, against the courts, against the media — that seems to rule within the Trump regime.

How damaging to our tattered republic, you have to conclude, are the petty vendettas of these thankfully passing people.

These new restrictions are beyond Draconian. Journalists covering the Pentagon are to be required to pledge not to report anything, anything at all, that has not been explicitly authorized by a department official. They will not be allowed even to gather information without such authorization. Access even to unclassified information will be limited to occasions “when there is a lawful government purpose for doing so.”

Reporters assigned to cover the Defense Department will now have to take pledges to get in the Pentagon’s front door? Just how far are these people going to go? This reminds me of the loyalty oaths required of federal employees during the McCarthyist 1950s.

Roughly 90 journalists cover the Pentagon at any given time. They will henceforth be restricted even from walking most of the building’s halls without an escort. “Failure to abide by these rules,” the memorandum warns, “may result in suspension or revocation of your building pass and loss of access.”

This is pretty close to Soviet, in my estimation.

“Journalists covering the Pentagon are to be required to pledge not to report anything, anything at all, that has not been explicitly authorized by a department official…. Access even to unclassified information will be limited…

Hegseth took to social media the day these restrictions were issued to journalists and, so, reported in their media. “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon,” he declared to all, “the people do.”

Tell me if this is not altogether Soviet.

It would be difficult to overstate the gravity of these measures. Taken to their extreme, and to go by the hyper-officious phrasing of the Sept. 18 memorandum the extreme is what Hegseth’s Pentagon has in mind, once these regulations go live the conduct of the imperium will no longer be visible to the public.

The imposition of total control of information — and so of all “narratives” — and the concealment of all conduct: These are the all-but-stated objectives. We are looking at unlimited prerogative and the strictest enforcement of secrecy, to describe this new regime another way. At this early moment I find it hard to imagine the extent of the lawlessness this may turn out to license.

I start to think the Trump II regime’s relations with media exceed the corruptions of the Cold War decades, and this is going some. But no president then was as brutishly ignorant and as indifferent to the Constitution as Trump. The imperium was on the ascendant during those first post–1945 decades; now it is bankrupt (in lots of ways) and obviously on the wane. The game is bound to get rougher as strength gives way to weakness…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Pete Hegseth has decreed a radical departure in professional practice for journalists covering the national security state. True and highly condemnable.

Pete Hegseth has codified long-established practices and a longstanding relationship between the press and power. True and highly condemnable. https://consortiumnews.com/2025/09/30/patrick-lawrence-the-war-depts-war-on-media/