Yes! You There in the Front, in the Red Hat!
While veteran national security reporters can’t get their calls answered, members of the new, MAGA-friendly press corps have a hotline to the Department of War.
Pentagon public affairs officers were conspicuously absent from the Military Reporters and Editors conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month, one more manifestation of the historic breakup that culminated in the departure of every major news outlet from the Pentagon press room in October.
“When official voices retreat behind locked doors, when our inquiries are met with ignored emails, the democracy that we serve is weakened,” Jen Judson, a defense reporter for Bloomberg News and the president of MRE, told conference attendees.
Things look different to some members of the Pentagon’s handpicked new press corps. “What I’ve seen so far, the Department of War has been forthcoming,” R.C. Maxwell, a reporter for RedState, a Salem Media–owned online outlet, told me. “They have a hotline, which you can immediately call, and someone will answer right now. I’ve dealt with the federal government for years. As the press secretary for Project Veritas, it was my responsibility to reach out to the government when we needed a comment on a story. Do you know how rare it was to actually receive an answer from an actual public affairs person? Are you aware that you can now actually call on the Pentagon [and] someone will answer?”
Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
Democracy and politics | Signalgate | The CBS submission | Voiceless America
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors