Since he was confirmed by the Senate five days into President Donald Trump’s second term, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has supposedly overseen a trillion-dollar budget with a workforce of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel.
Since Feb. 28, he’s supposedly been running the day-to-day operations of one of the largest air campaigns in recent history as the U.S. and Israel have pounded Iran’s military infrastructure to a pulp while touching off a global energy crisis with at least 13 American service members killed, including the crew of a KC-135 tanker aircraft.
But as the ex-Fox News host — a former Army National Guard Major who caught President Donald Trump’s attention by advocating for pardons for accused war criminals during his first term — made a rare appearance in the Pentagon’s briefing room on Friday, it was not the Supreme Leader (new or old one) that had Hegseth nearly breathless at the podium.
No, it was an enemy far more insidious that revealed itself to the self-titled Secretary of War — the free press.
Sgt. Rock-in-a-suit hadn’t even finished his first sentence when he started in with a gratuitous dig at his former colleagues in the “media,” urging the “fake news” to “actually admit” that the U.S. was “decimating the radical Iranian regime’s military in a way the world has never seen before.”
Setting aside the obvious fact that Hegseth — a graduate of Harvard and Princeton — is seemingly unaware that “decimating” Iran’s military would leave 90 percent of it functioning, the extraneous attack on press coverage was just the opening salvo.
After a series of boasts about the U.S. progress in destroying Iran’s offensive capabilities (plus comparing the country’s leadership to “rats” who are “cowering” in underground facilities) and a declaration that America’s military would give “no quarter” — something that would constitute a war crime — Hegseth turned his attention to an even more pressing matter: Television news graphics.
The former weekend morning show host purported to offer “a few suggestions” to the assembled reporters after grousing about “banners” and “headlines” seen by Americans that aren’t reflective of his own worldview.
Instead of “Mideast war intensifies,” Hegseth demanded an alternative headline: “Iran increasingly desperate.”
He also took issue with another “fake headline” which suggested the war is “widening” after Iran threatened to target shipping in the Strait of Hormuz — which, to the consternation of “fake news” copy editors everywhere, he insisted on repeatedly calling the Straits of Hormuz — and Israel began attacking targets in Lebanon with abandon.
“Here’s a real headline for you, for an actual patriotic press. How about, ‘Iran shrinking, going underground,’” Hegseth (by then quite ramped up about it), told the reporters gathered in a Pentagon briefing room.
And on top of that, he went after CNN — the only major U.S. network to have had a correspondent inside Iran since the start of the war — for reporting that Trump administration officials told Congress they had underestimated the extent to which Iran would seek to retaliate against airstrikes by cutting off tanker traffic through the strait, a transit point for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
He called the scoop “patently ridiculous” and suggested that Iran “always” holds the strait “hostage.”
“It’s a fundamentally unserious report. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he said, referring to the MAGA-friendly billionaire Paramount chief who recently bought CNN’s parent company after acquiring CBS earlier last year.
It’s not as if the multimillionaire ex-talking head’s tirades against the industry that made him both extremely wealthy and a nationally-recognized figure are anything new.
After spending years on Fox News railing against “mainstream media” despite working at the highest-rated cable network in the country, Trump rewarded him with the Pentagon in large part because of his long history of attacking his colleagues in the press corps — and because of what Trump considers his “central casting” appearance: White, male, buff and well-coiffed.
Since his confirmation, Hegseth’s tenure as the least-experienced defense secretary in U.S. history has been defined in part by his disdain for the free and independent press corps that had walked the Pentagon’s halls since the labyrinthine building was completed during World War II.
Early on, his hand-picked press aides tossed out major legitimate news organizations from the workspace they’d reported from along the Pentagon’s “correspondents’ corridor” for decades and replaced them with mostly right-wing outlets — Lindell TV??!! — that lacked the resources or will to consistently cover his department, whether in a sycophantic manner or not.
Obsessed with his own image and seeing leaks everywhere, Hegseth (who more and more each day is coming to resemble Colin Jost’s not-great caricature of him on SNL) then ordered more restrictions by limiting the press to the building’s cafeteria and their work area, banning them even from places where tourists can freely go in the world’s second-largest office building.
The point of the new rules was clear — to limit impromptu interactions between reporters and potential sources that might lead to unflattering information making its way to journalists. In other words, news reporting.
It didn’t work. Stories still ran that presented him — or the president — in a negative, or at least critical, light. So Hegseth cracked down even more last fall by effectively banning legitimate news operations from the Pentagon unless their reporters signed a pledge not to report anything that hadn’t been pre-cleared by the Pentagon.
Even his own former employer, Fox News, said “no thanks” to such a dog’s breakfast of a policy. They, along with all but a handful of small operators or sycophants, walked out of the Pentagon after surrendering their credentials in September.
And while Hegseth and his press staff have permitted some of those same legitimate organizations back in for limited briefings such as the one held on Friday, he’s consistently shown his contempt for them by forcing their representatives — including his own former Fox colleague, a widely-respected Pentagon veteran named Jennifer Griffin — to sit in the back of the room while he fields softballs from a who’s who of clownish brown-nosers from explicitly pro-Trump “news” outlets.
Occasionally, one of those partisan commentators does ask a good question, such as when Lindell TV’s Cara Castronuova used a similar briefing on Tuesday to ask about specific steps the Pentagon is taking to minimize civilian casualties in Iran — a hot topic after a U.S. missile accidentally struck a girls’ school on the first day of the air campaign.
But those exceptions are just that, exceptions. Hegseth’s reliance on partisan mouthpieces and his disdain for legitimate reporting also extend beyond television and the written word to visual journalists. Just this week, The Washington Post scooped that he’d ordered award-winning still photographers out of his briefings after he found their photographs of him to be “unflattering.”
Between obsessing over whether news photographs make him look sufficiently handsome and arguing about television chyrons (the captions that occupy the lower third of news broadcasts), it leaves one to wonder when the Defense Secretary has time to do honest-to-God Defense Secretary stuff.
And with Iran choking off oil and risking a global economic disaster by doing so, he might do well to turn off the TV and get back to work.
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