Why Hegseth’s new press policy was bound to fail

Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times, teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration tried to place curbs on the press. Those efforts to restrict and manage news coverage failed to protect government secrets or prevent the press from covering the most controversial parts of the so-called war on terror.

That is why I was certain that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new policy demanding prepublication Pentagon approval of the stories reporters cover was bound to fail.Already the Pentagon had made arbitrary changes limiting where some reporters do their work, including putting the briefing room off-limits. Weeks ago, journalists from mainstream news organizations were summarily evicted from the workspaces they had long occupied and were replaced by representatives of news organizations that are friendly to President Trump, like One America News and Breitbart News.

Before the president appointed him, Hegseth was the cohost of a program on Fox News Channel.

There is little evidence that press coverage has ever harmed national security. In 1971, when president Nixon tried to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, he claimed that making the papers public would severely damage the country’s safety.

Speaking to the American Bar Association a decade later, Erwin Griswold, who was Nixon’s solicitor general and who had unsuccessfully argued against publication of the Pentagon Papers before the Supreme Court, admitted that he knew of no harm to national security from allowing the public to read the secret history.

After 9/11, when the press exposed overseas prison sites where suspected terrorists were tortured, illegal domestic government surveillance programs, or faulty pre-Iraq War intelligence, the news media served the public interest. If a war on terror was being waged in their name, Americans needed to know about it. Democracy requires the informed consent of citizens.

The First Amendment is first for a reason. The Founders who wrote the Bill of Rights were deathly afraid of over-centralized power. Having experienced the rule of an all-powerful king, they saw a free press and an informed citizenry as the bulwark against government overreach.

Hegseth’s original draft of the new policy would have required reporters to sign agreements promising not to reveal information without Pentagon preapproval. Reporters who refused to sign risked having their Pentagon press credentials yanked. I couldn’t imagine any self-respecting journalist going along with this new policy, which clearly violates both the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Pentagon Papers decision that made prepublication censorship illegal. (The government can prosecute officials who leak to reporters and are their sources.) Hegseth, like other members of Trump’s Cabinet, doesn’t seem to feel bound by Supreme Court precedent.

Some Republicans have criticized the blatant overreach. “We don’t want a bunch of Pravda newspapers only touting the Government’s official position,” Representative Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska, posted on X. “A free press makes our country better.”

So, I was not surprised when the backlash grew and, after two weeks of negotiations with press representatives, the Pentagon was forced to soften the policy. Preapproval of sensitive stories is no longer required, but reporters can still be branded security risks if they press their sources in the military to reveal classified information and can still lose their Pentagon press credentials. Restrictions on where they can gather news in the Pentagon remain. News organizations and reporters have a week to sign the new policy. It’s still an agonizing choice that puts too much power over a free press in the hands of the Pentagon.

When I was a senior editor at The New York Times, there were instances when the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA asked the paper not to publish stories dealing with pending military operations or highly classified intelligence programs.

In a few cases the Times delayed publication to gather more information or agreed to withhold certain details from stories that were deemed by editors to be nonessential for readers to know. In these cases, the government seemed to be concerned as much about the risk of embarrassment as about potential harm to national security. These were voluntary negotiations with no signed agreements about how journalists did their work.

Reporters can’t be stopped from pursuing the news, as even Trump seemed to recognize when he said, on Sept. 21, that he didn’t think the Hegseth preapproval policy would work. “Nothing stops reporters,” he said.

Nonetheless, his administration is certainly making it ever more difficult for them to fulfill their First Amendment obligation to keep the public informed.

Fear pervades newsrooms across the country. Trump’s multimillion-dollar lawsuits against media companies, which have resulted in cowardly settlements; the rise of powerful right-wing news companies that are favored by the White House; public media funding cuts; and other threats have put the traditional news media on the defensive.

So have plummeting public trust numbers. Last week, a Gallup poll showed that public trust in the media fell to 28 percent. (In the 1970s, when Gallup began measuring, 72 percent of Americans had confidence in the news media.) Politicization and partisanship have contributed to the cratering ratings.

It’s concerning to see CBS, once called the Tiffany network because of its high-quality programs, under new ownership by David Ellison, the son of billionaire and Trump supporter Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. Ellison is putting Bari Weiss, a right-center journalist and fervent supporter of Israel, in charge of the CBS news division. Weiss worked on the opinion side of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and later founded The Free Press, a digital site.

Ellison has also reportedly set his sights on a deal that could put CNN under his control. Some former CBS journalists told me they expect to see the departures of outspokenly anti-Trump hosts and correspondents after Weiss settles in.

The public dislikes censorship, if the outraged reaction to the brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show is any measure. We’ll see how it reacts to an ever more powerful conservative news media.