This kind of boycott needs to happen for the WH press corps. If there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions, or being expelled from the room for asking tough questions, then everyone needs to walk. Immediately.
Game theory applies here. There will always be one journalist without any moral qualms that’ll stay, betting on everyone else leaving, and making a scoop.
Well, the White House press corps has already been changed to (how do I write this in a way that won't get me downvoted?) include more reporters friendly to the current administration since the White House asserted the right to determine itself who gets access (formerly it was the White House Correspondents' Association), so the chances of such a more-or-less unified boycott are slim. And I don't have any doubts that the Pentagon will also quickly find enough "warm bodies" (besides those from OANN) to prevent an embarrassing almost empty room at the next press conference...
>>there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions
That's not exactly what's happening.
>>The rules limit where reporters can go without an official escort and convey “an unprecedented message of intimidation” for anyone in the Defense Department who might want to speak to a reporter without the approval of Hegseth’s team
On NPR (National Public Radio) a few days ago, a reporter said they could wander the halls of the Pentagon and ask anyone they ran into any question about anything. This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
They wouldn't have full access, but yes, journalists should be able to ask anyone anything. Asking is legal, and it's up to the person being asked to not say anything that a journalist isn't supposed to know.
What bad things have happened from what you're describing?
Consider the power of this statement then: if they were ok with all of those things and now they draw a line that means that things have gotten much, much worse than they were before.
Well... maybe. If a company brings in new anti-sexual-assault training and a bunch of people quit around the same time that doesn't necessarily suggest the problem is the outrageous training.
I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.
If you want me to try explaining something more clearly you should include a rough outline of what you think I said. Otherwise I've basically got nothing to do but repeat myself. Hopefully this helps.
The journalists and the generals can presumably still talk to each other over drinks after work. The journalists were only ever going to be tolerated in the building because US leadership thinks they are helping them achieve military propaganda aims which are rarely noble things. There isn't much at stake here beyond classified information.
US classified information has been a bit of a disaster for them. It just means the government is slowly escaping accountability for what it does. They have that massive spying program on US citizens and the last I heard of the story was they can't sue anyone over it because the courts aren't allowed to believe it exists.
This isn't about security at all. This is about control of the narrative. Hegseth and co would like you to believe it is about security. But there is absolutely no indication that there was an urgent issue that needs resolution.
The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative. We're moving from a state where the government was trying to control the narrative to the same state.
That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.
This clearly has nothing to do with security, but do you really believe journalists are just "wandering" around the Pentagon and getting into classified materials?
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.
* whether you need to limit people learning something
* whether you need to limit people publishing something
"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.
1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.
You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.
>They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.
As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.
So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.
>SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised
He acts like every other person (myself included) that i know that had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed but still looks funny at his favorite drink. With a guy like this you literally never know what the clear liquid in the glass bottle is.
Also, in some cases the press did apologise, e.g. https://archive.ph/F3Ra1 . Fox news were notoriously the worst propagandisers in this case; I searched but could not find any apology from them.
What I want to know is: why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
If you did agree to the terms you'd be limited to publishing the official story (and can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff), but you get that for free anyway even if you never show up, so why bother with the extra expense of actually going to the Pentagon?
They'll get exclusive interviews, they'll get to be visible on TV asking questions to important people, they'll get invited on trips where they can film in front of a cool background like a military base or something.
I think it's worth it for anyone that cares about the aesthetics of journalism more than actually reporting anything of value.
> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
Imagine being an aspiring blogger/independent journalist. One can only dream of such a possibility as to join the press corp of Pentagon. Of course many will agree to all restrictions and rules for the opportunity.
If you do a good enough job publishing the official government narrative, you might get promoted to cabinet member. Half this cabinet are former teenage youtubers who did a good enough job supporting the regime's first term.
They couldn’t do anything else. The power grab happens even when they would have succumbed. At least they quit with a spine.
If they don’t go back in a week, which can be seen from several examples, like Hungary, that it doesn’t work. I think compared to the Hungarian government, this was a misstep of Trump (which I hope they make it more). In Hungary, when something like this happened, you always lost when you didn’t succumb to authoritarianism. You lost your previous privileges no matter what, but you lost more if you protested. They tried to keep up a facade that nothing changed, while everything changed. In this case it seems to me as an outside observer, that nothing value was lost by quitting compared to signing up.
Or Trump and co don’t want to keep a facade at all. But then they need to bet on that most people in America are really fascists.
Not a US citizen but affected by the current trajectory of the policies by the current administration.
I wonder at what point in time people will have enough with what they are changing. How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
I do think the HN and tech community is a more diverse group, than just the ultra libertarians, opportunists, and outright fascists. Maybe that's just my naive hope.
In any case I would also like to know how US based techies think about this administration and the direction the country is heading in.
And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, or making statements they expect the group to agree with. Nobody comes out of the conversation smarter than they went in.
Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.
Most people do the same thing with shiny technology topics too.
But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
Problem: Everything is political. Pretending not to talk about politics, is mostly just supporting a certain kind of politics (the one that you get by default if you avoid talking about politics).
If there is anything Trump is doing popularly, it’s aggressively removing illegal immigrants from our streets. To the extent there is tolerance for Fourth Amendment violations, it may be from historic indifference to enforcing our immigration laws.
It has worked in the UK. The then government had decided to unilaterally exclude some "hostile" media from the room and all the others walked out in protest.
Not sure if it this was ever tried before by any US government entity - but, if the condition for remaining an accredited Pentagon reporter is only reporting the official statements of the Pentagon (which you can also copy from their press releases), then having the accreditation seems largely pointless to me?
Time was when the liberal press looked down on journalists who were embedded with the military. The article mentions one who has had a desk in the pentagon for almost two decades. I would question the independence of someone so well embedded and note nobody is resigning here, just moving to other offices.
They turned in their badges that allows them to access certain spaces in the pentagon. They're still reporters, they still work for their employers, and they can still do reporting.
I used to watch Donald Rumsfeld daily giving his briefing… the hardest questions asked to him by the beacons of democracy in the press corps was “how are you”.
> I remember how then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ecstatic after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, insisting that it showed the success of the U.S. invasion. Not long after, I ran into an officer at the Pentagon who told me, "No, Tom. It's not a success. Saddam Hussein's supporters are attacking our supply lines. Now, we have to send more troops back to guard them." That was because the United States, at Rumsfeld's insistence, never sent an adequate number of forces to Iraq to begin with — a fact another Army general warned me about, unsolicited — and I reported on, before the war even began.
> Instead of toeing the official line, that reporting helped people understand what U.S. troops were really facing. Far from being a success, the fall of Baghdad marked the beginning of an insurgency that stretched on for years.
Well every step they do seems to be copy/pasted from North Korea.
Since nobody is protesting now you can expect that 5 years from now the regime will start making disappear people vaguely opposing the gov decisions or being suicided on a regular basis.
While what the government is doing more widely is quite scary, this in isolation seems sensible?
I don't really get what the journalists' role is? To goad and harass employees of the Department of defense in to slipping up and saying more than they should? To encourage people to leak information?
Given the secretive nature of the whole institution, It seems sensible that there is some formal process for deciding what information should and shouldn't be shared. The previous setup seems sort of insane.
If the army is putting babies on spikes and it needs to be leaked.. it seems that that should happen outside of the Pentagon itself and shouldn't involve getting some government approved badge...
Accountable in what sense? How are journalists trying to pry extra info from staff helpful? If they want to ask questions at press conferences and whatnot - as far as I understand they still can?
by questioning them publicly and holding them to account. That's not a leak. That's keeping people in check (or force them to lie in front of camera). Remove that and you only rely on Edward Snowdens of the world.
My understanding is they want off-the-record information from unnamed sources. These aren't public questions like at a press conference. Those can still occur under the current rules.
"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."
Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.
This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII, often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative. Both points were repopularised in the US around 2016 or so by Richard Spencer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer). For some reason both are now entering more mainstream usage among the right.
Yes, calling the media liars is a thing the Nazis did. However, it's not a good reason to equate someone with Nazis because lots of other people from all parts of the political spectrum have called the media liars from time to time. And a number of times, the media has even deserved it. I challenge anyone who disagrees to go take a dive in historical newspaper archives.
Well, I wouldn't shut down or lock out any press. I wouldn't shut down Jewish-owned press either. All news and media is biased, and there's no such platonic ideal of honesty. Then again, I don't have "enemies" that I need to destroy so maybe you're asking the wrong person.
> This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII,
Presumably you mean "dishonest". Do you think OAN is dishonest and perhaps disruptive to world peace?
Thinking the press is dishonest does not make one a Nazi. Even if disliking the press were a sign if despotism, Clconsider what makes Nazism unique compared to other despotic regimes, disliking the press ain't it.
I don't think any free press is disruptive to world peace. Even if you get your wish and shut up any outlet you personally find dishonest you're not going to achieve world peace. At least not the kind I'd like to live in.
No. They are propaganda outlets, and must not be considered separately from the Republican Party.
The current mechanism is
1) Fringe theory gestates in the internet.
2) Fringe theory gets into the podcast network and is covered
3) Relatively famous personality comes on a Fox program and mentions the theory
4) Government figures repeats theory that was covered on the news
5) Fox repeats government coverage
People on the right who have alternative theories, simply do not get air time. They aren’t suppressed, they are simply not competitive.
In a more economic framing of their efforts - they have found a way to offset the costs of inaccurate content to the future.
So they are now able to “sell” cheap “junk food” content, while the center and left spends more effort in forming more accurate content.
The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
But today the NYT is more a site dependent on its wordle revenue than its subscription revenue. Consolidation of markets means advertisers do not need smaller local newspapers, and platforms get the lions share of attention.
There is no business model to sustain a free information economy.
> The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
Up until about 2016 I would have agreed to this. After the last month or two, I don't see how a rational human can think this anymore. Neither side has any mainstream news outlet which tries to be honest in its reporting. You want facts? The talking heads have their own YouTube channels now. If you can find a decent selection of them, they provide more honest reporting and far better analysis than the media on either side provides currently.
It's always fun to compare Trump quotes against other presidential quotes.
Jefferson: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and 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."
Reagan: "There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our 'noble experiment' in self-government"
FDR: "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."
The issue comes in theory vs practice. Obviously in theory a free press is absolutely key to a free society, but in practice the press often ends up with different motivations. Another, rather more famous comment from Jefferson on the press [1]:
---
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
I'd be surprised if anyone believed everything the press said. It doesn't even seem possible as different press outlets will say conflicting things. But even if someone did, that isn't really an argument that a free press is an enemy of world peace so I'm not seeing how your point is related.
Let me try. About 125 years ago there was something called the Spanish-American war. It only lasted 4 days so most people forget about it. It was basically started by the press, specifically by Hurst. It is where we get the term 'yellow journalism'.
Basically the press claimed that the Spanish sabotaged a US navy ship called the USS Maine. The Maine had a boiler accident which caused it to explode but the press claimed it was the Spanish. The government used this as an excuse to take the remaining bits of Spain's empire away from them. So that might be an example of the press being 'an enemy of world peace'. No, I'm not sure the current media would do that. But it is an example of a free press starting a war to sell fish wrap.
I'll take a a free press over an authoritarian controlled one any day. A boot stamping on a human face forever is not the kind of world peace I'm interested in, even if it's my boot. But I can understand the allure for a certain kind of person.
Our dishonest press is in no way mutually exclusive or in any way opposed to authoritarian control. And there is no right being violated here, at least not as far as we know. The courts may decide otherwise, but I don't think they have a right to this information above and beyond the existing FOIA system.
The Trump admin is the most transparent admin in decades and they provide much more access to the dishonest press than most admins.
It's exactly because I know what our dishonest state-owned press reports about Trump and what they did report about Biden, and I also know what is happening in the US.
If Trump sneezes we find out that sneezing is something Hitler did, if Trump stops a war in Gaza we hear how one time Hitler talked about ending wars.
Our dishonest state-owned press is against wars except when Hamas loses, then they think that war may not have been that bad and want to tell us all the good things about war and the bad things about peace.
Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
> Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
You, uh, you do know this whole idea is right wing propaganda, right? None of that is what actually happened, it's what right wing media says happened.
Not really. Biden had a press pool like every president before them, and the press was free to disagree with him. He just didn't do interviews.
Trump's DoD just threatened to revoke press credentials of anyone who reported on things they didn't authorize. Also, the other current scandal is one of the people reporting on RFK both slept with him and gave him positive coverage, which is wild.
Trump regularly kicked reporters out of the press pool for saying things he didn't like and then took over deciding who can be in it and who isn't.
It's not really transparency if you make sure to include only people who promise to say what you want them to say, is it?
Personally, I read it as added-emphasis rather than a retort against the author, but I can see how it could be taken that way depending on assumed verbal delivery.
What is the point of being a Journalist (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "write", word for word, the article they give you to publish?
If you identify sufficiently with the people giving you the article to publish, it's not a "they" but an "us". Even if the decisions are taken in rooms you don't have access to.
Maybe they think they'll get access to them eventually if they're loyal.
It might seem cowardly, but it isn't that different to what happens every day in business. Society is full of organisations working on the "make the boss' opinions your own" principle.
You're never heard of biased or militant journalists have you?
In fact the most common form of journalism you will find is what's akin to a Propaganda channel of a Sponsoring Party (Defense, Media Company, Political party, Rich Individual with an agenda, etc). Essentialy a PR employee.
But this is true since always.
The kind of journalism we usually think of though is Investigative journalism, but that's a different beast and usually doesn't really pay.
> if you identify too little with them, you probably don't even get to "sit where you're sitting", as Chomsky said
The people winning White House credentials are political influencers. Chomsky was an interesting linguist. His political observations are about as scientific as our current crop of Silicon Valley elites’.
What he said, and I agree is true and important, is that you won't get to work as a journalist and do things like, say, interview people for BBC, unless you believe most of the things your employer believes.
Chomsky's observations about how the media works may not have been solid science, but from the way you describe the present circumstance it really sounds like Chomsky is still on target.
What is the point of being a Developer (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "code", word for word, the feature specifications ("user stories") they give you to build?
I think people are being slightly hyperbolic. It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon. In general I think this is a good thing but not because I think it's a good idea. Rather, I think that the government, regardless of who happens to be in power, and the press should have an adversarial relationship, but the deep intertwining of the government and the press undermines this, even without corruption. You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.
People are not being hyperbolic. This is reducing the transparency of Pentagon to the American people. See also the Whitehouse banning the AP earlier this year.
> It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon.
Without access it's going to be very hard to do good reporting, adversarial or otherwise. This is the government working to control what is said.
> You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
The world is built on relationships. One of the keys of being a good journalist/reporter is being able to have relationships which help to build stories while also staying objective.
There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.
It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.
There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.
It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.
The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.
And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.
With the blatant disregard for any rules and decorum, and a proven self-serving track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.
You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.
Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.
The rules were updated on Oct6 to allow media outlets to report using any information even if classified and unapproved for release, as long as they didn't solicit it or were given it with the premise that it won't be released.
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
This is a hyperbolic take. In countries with military censors, articles are submitted, from the newspaper's offices, to the censor's office for approval before publication. Nothing under this arrangement stops an American colonel from walking into the NYT's offices, dropping a folder at reception, and persuading the NYT to publish the contents of that folder. While it does prevent investigative journalism in the military, which is despicable on its own merits, the fact that it turns newspapers solely into PR outlets is neither new (i.e. as a general phenomenon in American media) nor limited to only the officially sanctioned point of view.
I like your reasoning. There’s nothing stopping a news outlet from publishing anything other than the clearly outlined consequences. In a similar vein there’s nothing stopping anybody from finding out what happens if you swallow a D battery but for some reason none of my friends are doing that
This is no different than pretty much any company. Do you think Apple lets reporters wander throughout their campus looking for new hardware, and allow them to ask engineers information about what they are working on? No. Apple does not let them wander around, and they advise all of their employees to never talk to press.
If Apple had the ability to deploy military forces on behalf of my democratically elected government I'd actually be pretty concerned with them locking out the press too.
Apple is neither a state nor a democracy.
The journalists and the government are there to aserve the same boss: the people.
Now one of the people's employees sabotages the work the other employee.
I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answered to me (a US citizen) by its previous policy of letting a bunch of reporters from some mainstream news outlets have offices inside the Pentagon under one set of rules, and I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answers to me by its current policy of putting more rules on those reporters that they don't like and are willing to resign over. I have a healthy amount of mistrust for both the US military and mainstream US journalism operations, and I don't assume that the military-related stories these reporters covered previously were the ones that were actually important for me to know.
You have classified information for that reason. It's not the same as requiring journalists you literally let into public press conferences to shut up and spread propaganda unquestioningly
This is about not wanting the journalists to even ask for information from e.g. generals. No-one is saying that they want immediate disclosure of all secrets - I'm concerned that you're building a strawman.
>Journalists asking for classified and sensitive information are acting in bad faifth.
How?
>They know that these people are not allowed to give away the information,
Not true, nor is everything is classified.
It appears you've not actually read the article, or what the new restrictions even asked for. You're acting as if journalists were allowed to go rummaging in office drawers and journalists dislike being told they can't do that anymore.
Or they could be trying to uncover malicious acts hidden behind classification. You may be too young or too old to understand, but historically it goes both ways.
I completely disagree. Their job is to uncover truths that may not be immediately obvious and they may not even know the classification status of sensitive information before asking about it. The military should instead say something like "that information is classified".
Why would the public want journalists to not even be able to ask the questions, never mind actually get the information?
This is moving the goal posts from your original position. Spend the time to refocus - if your position was erroneous, it was erroneous. Correct it, figure out what that means, then proceed.
Moving on to a new version is to waste your own intelligence in reactionary sentence creation.
no, actually that requires congressional approval, and the government is currently shut down, mostly as a way to defer the release of the Epstein files. nice try, though.
What's next? Asking hard questions, or follow up questions?
If Trump says "I've ended 7 or 8 wars" or says "I've lowered drug prices 800, 900, 1000 percent" and no one says
"Sir, how is it possible to lower a price by 900 percent" or "Could you specify which conflicts it is you refer to by those 7 or 8 wars?" then you aren't a journalist.
If you go to an event where such things are said and there is no opportunity to ask these obvious follow up questions, then you stop going there, or you aren't a journalist.
If someone asks these questions and that leaves them excluded from those events - then you also stop going there in solidarity, or you aren't a journalist.
The American people need to start prosecuting their war criminals, plain and simple - and this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court.
The notion that American exceptionalism inoculates America's war criminals from facing justice at the hand of International bodies set up specifically for that purpose, is incorrect and anti-human.
It is time for justice.
You can't maintain this culture of warrior narcissism, Americans.
It will end in tragedy - as it has already brought chaos and calamity to millions of innocent people across the globe, this century. The USA and its allies are, by a huge margin, the #1 cause of terror and war on the planet at this time. Nobody even comes close to the level of criminal war-mongering that occurs at the behest of the US' political establishment. No, not Russia. Not China. The USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none.
Come to grips with the crimes of your state. It is the #1 most important thing for Americans to do, for the rest of the world.
The American people are the only force on the planet which can reign in their monsters. It has to be done by the people, for the people.
> this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court
Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. It’s not appropriate for great powers, whether that be America or China.
We need to deal with this domestically. With our own laws. In our own courts.
> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none
In my opinion the role of the press is NOT to spin the narrative but to report objectively and contextualise the reported information, ask critical questions with the aim to uncover inefficiency, injustice etc.
Sadly the media, at least the big one do little if that lately and rather feed on hollow sensations empty of information or critical reflection but generating clicks.
My dude, I agree with the point you were making in the original comment before you edited it. But if you write aggressive comments with no room for discussion, you can't be surprised when people just downvote you.
Rational argument: the government has lied innumerable times. The reason we know about a handful of them is journalism. If you want your spin straight from the tap, you can read press releases on the DoD website. If you want critical analysis, verification, and other perspectives you’re gonna need a healthy fifth estate. Journalists have biases, but so do governments.
The media is called the fourth estate (not 5th). A 5th column would be more like sleeper cells.
And the media lies at least as much as our government. That's why ratings are so far down. They have burned their credibility that previous generations of journalists spent decades building up.
That is only part of the story, not the full story, where journalists and CIA analysts get together and determine the truth. you've seen the video Snowden posted about this? It is a known reality. Why hide it behind the facade of a free press? There are many dimensions to this story, including Zionist bias by mainstream "journalists" that told you there was no genocide and Israel is a victim, and they've kept up that lie even after the UN declared it a genocide.
In (Part Two) it was external actors laying bricks that isolated Waters' protaganist, and in (Part Three) cause passes the Rubicon as everyone and everything is lumped together as just more bricks in the wall.
This kind of boycott needs to happen for the WH press corps. If there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions, or being expelled from the room for asking tough questions, then everyone needs to walk. Immediately.
Game theory applies here. There will always be one journalist without any moral qualms that’ll stay, betting on everyone else leaving, and making a scoop.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0900636106
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212126109
https://sjdm.org/~baron/journal/14/14715/jdm14715.html
Well, the White House press corps has already been changed to (how do I write this in a way that won't get me downvoted?) include more reporters friendly to the current administration since the White House asserted the right to determine itself who gets access (formerly it was the White House Correspondents' Association), so the chances of such a more-or-less unified boycott are slim. And I don't have any doubts that the Pentagon will also quickly find enough "warm bodies" (besides those from OANN) to prevent an embarrassing almost empty room at the next press conference...
They should all ask the hard questions. If they're going to not have access either way, why not take the way that also exposes the corruption?
>>there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions
That's not exactly what's happening.
>>The rules limit where reporters can go without an official escort and convey “an unprecedented message of intimidation” for anyone in the Defense Department who might want to speak to a reporter without the approval of Hegseth’s team
On NPR (National Public Radio) a few days ago, a reporter said they could wander the halls of the Pentagon and ask anyone they ran into any question about anything. This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
They wouldn't have full access, but yes, journalists should be able to ask anyone anything. Asking is legal, and it's up to the person being asked to not say anything that a journalist isn't supposed to know.
What bad things have happened from what you're describing?
First sign of a profession having a backbone in months.
Although the silent treatment the generals dished out at recent meeting wasn’t bad either
>First sign of a profession having a backbone in months
They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
Now they suddenly grew a "backbone"?
They just see the signs of lack of long term legitimacy for this particular government and play pretend at safe courage.
Consider the power of this statement then: if they were ok with all of those things and now they draw a line that means that things have gotten much, much worse than they were before.
Well... maybe. If a company brings in new anti-sexual-assault training and a bunch of people quit around the same time that doesn't necessarily suggest the problem is the outrageous training.
I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.
> would probably have an easier time securing
Hold up, that's starting to conflate two very different ideas of what's going on:
1. "We cannot tolerate any outside visitors because it could possibly give them an opportunity to commit espionage and other serious federal crimes.
2. "We cannot tolerate specific vetted reporters that haven't promised us control over what they write and how they write it."
We can tell this isn't a (#1) concern over actual security. If it were, this (#2) "deal" would never be offered at all.
This comment seems highly confused.
Without giving any indication of the issues you found, your comment is entirely unhelpful and unproductive.
If you want me to try explaining something more clearly you should include a rough outline of what you think I said. Otherwise I've basically got nothing to do but repeat myself. Hopefully this helps.
The journalists and the generals can presumably still talk to each other over drinks after work. The journalists were only ever going to be tolerated in the building because US leadership thinks they are helping them achieve military propaganda aims which are rarely noble things. There isn't much at stake here beyond classified information.
US classified information has been a bit of a disaster for them. It just means the government is slowly escaping accountability for what it does. They have that massive spying program on US citizens and the last I heard of the story was they can't sue anyone over it because the courts aren't allowed to believe it exists.
This isn't about security at all. This is about control of the narrative. Hegseth and co would like you to believe it is about security. But there is absolutely no indication that there was an urgent issue that needs resolution.
The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative. We're moving from a state where the government was trying to control the narrative to the same state.
That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.
This clearly has nothing to do with security, but do you really believe journalists are just "wandering" around the Pentagon and getting into classified materials?
According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon. What materials they are getting, I don't know.
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.
there are separate issues
* whether you need to limit people learning something
* whether you need to limit people publishing something
"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.
1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.
You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.
>They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.
As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.
So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.
This might be what we need. SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised. Giving him less earned media may be a win.
>SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised
He acts like every other person (myself included) that i know that had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed but still looks funny at his favorite drink. With a guy like this you literally never know what the clear liquid in the glass bottle is.
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But that's a separate issue, different circumstances and, mostly, different people. Similar to how they (in part) reported during epidemic.
But now they did something good and it's somehow nullified by the other things?
Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?
Also, in some cases the press did apologise, e.g. https://archive.ph/F3Ra1 . Fox news were notoriously the worst propagandisers in this case; I searched but could not find any apology from them.
> Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?
Sure! Once the people responsible for the wars have been punished. Any day now...
What I want to know is: why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
If you did agree to the terms you'd be limited to publishing the official story (and can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff), but you get that for free anyway even if you never show up, so why bother with the extra expense of actually going to the Pentagon?
They'll get exclusive interviews, they'll get to be visible on TV asking questions to important people, they'll get invited on trips where they can film in front of a cool background like a military base or something.
I think it's worth it for anyone that cares about the aesthetics of journalism more than actually reporting anything of value.
> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
Imagine being an aspiring blogger/independent journalist. One can only dream of such a possibility as to join the press corp of Pentagon. Of course many will agree to all restrictions and rules for the opportunity.
Then how are you different than the "press release" page on Pentagon website?
You don't get access to networking and opportunities by reposting press releases from the warmth of your basement.
Ok, but you can't publish anything from such networking otherwise you will lose your pass. So what's the point?
If you do a good enough job publishing the official government narrative, you might get promoted to cabinet member. Half this cabinet are former teenage youtubers who did a good enough job supporting the regime's first term.
They get to publishing official "leaks" and the ability to ask additional questions that allow the story to be tailored towards their readers.
> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
The ones who stay are influencers. Not journalists. Their viewers (almost certainly not readers) don’t know the difference.
That's not true. It's an agreement not to publish classified information that has been leaked to the media.
Nothing stops them from publishing criticisms of the administrations talking points, or conversations that happen outside of press conferences.
Hey I embrace remote working too, but not everyone views it that way
> can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff
Obviously this rule would apply only to real journalists. Members of the party will get free roam. They will stay.
Just another day in the life of a regime.
I'm pleasantly surprised that journalists are doing this due to how tepid news companies generally are.
They couldn’t do anything else. The power grab happens even when they would have succumbed. At least they quit with a spine.
If they don’t go back in a week, which can be seen from several examples, like Hungary, that it doesn’t work. I think compared to the Hungarian government, this was a misstep of Trump (which I hope they make it more). In Hungary, when something like this happened, you always lost when you didn’t succumb to authoritarianism. You lost your previous privileges no matter what, but you lost more if you protested. They tried to keep up a facade that nothing changed, while everything changed. In this case it seems to me as an outside observer, that nothing value was lost by quitting compared to signing up.
Or Trump and co don’t want to keep a facade at all. But then they need to bet on that most people in America are really fascists.
This is move by the journalists is inspiring to be honest, ending press freedom is what they want.
Not a US citizen but affected by the current trajectory of the policies by the current administration.
I wonder at what point in time people will have enough with what they are changing. How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
> How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
HN and the broader tech community have had their mask off moments.
I do think the HN and tech community is a more diverse group, than just the ultra libertarians, opportunists, and outright fascists. Maybe that's just my naive hope. In any case I would also like to know how US based techies think about this administration and the direction the country is heading in.
> people will have enough
Likely at least a third of Americans do actively support the current administration and their decisions, so "having enough" is out of the question.
”Let’s not talk politics, it’s just inflammatory. Hey, cool LLM model. Shiny!”
That would be very funny if it weren't disturbingly close to the truth.
I believe 90% of mean people on the web talking about politics are actually bots.
And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, or making statements they expect the group to agree with. Nobody comes out of the conversation smarter than they went in.
Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.
Most people do the same thing with shiny technology topics too.
But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
Problem: Everything is political. Pretending not to talk about politics, is mostly just supporting a certain kind of politics (the one that you get by default if you avoid talking about politics).
49.8% of the population voted for Trump, myself among them. First time voting Republican.
Everything I've seen so far from Trump is what I voted for. And almost everything Democrats have said and done has reaffirmed my choice.
Every one I've spoken to that has been surprised Trump was elected lives in a bubble. Hacker News is one such bubble.
You're not going to get any reliable "when are the masses going to revolt" info here.
People being grabbed off the streets and transported to prison in unrelated country is what you voted for?
The people who are in the US illegally, 1000% yes.
If there is anything Trump is doing popularly, it’s aggressively removing illegal immigrants from our streets. To the extent there is tolerance for Fourth Amendment violations, it may be from historic indifference to enforcing our immigration laws.
This is it, exactly.
I used to be a very "live and let live" type of person.
Then the relaxed "let live" part got abused. I've seen what happens first hand having lived in NYC for 6 years, and now living in London.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
The aggressiveness is losing people who may have supported his immigration policies initially.
They gave him his second term, he doesn't need them anymore.
> aggressiveness is losing people
Losing, but hasn’t lost. Point is if someone is proudly pro-Trump right now, immigration probably isn’t going to prompt introspection.
Would it be possible to briefly list what you voted him for?
Immigration is #1.
About 77 million people voted for Trump in 2024, that is 22% of the US population. He is actually far more unpopular than people think.
This is how you lie with statistics.
What percent of the US population is eligible to vote, what percent actually voted, and which percent did Kamala receive?
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Curious how long this will actually last before the outlets cave under access pressure again. Has anything like this worked before?
It has worked in the UK. The then government had decided to unilaterally exclude some "hostile" media from the room and all the others walked out in protest.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/03/political-j...
Not sure if it this was ever tried before by any US government entity - but, if the condition for remaining an accredited Pentagon reporter is only reporting the official statements of the Pentagon (which you can also copy from their press releases), then having the accreditation seems largely pointless to me?
The Pengagon Press Corps was born out of WWII censorship [1]. Shutting down this institution may be for the best.
[1] https://brendonbeebe.substack.com/p/history-of-pentagon-pres...
Time was when the liberal press looked down on journalists who were embedded with the military. The article mentions one who has had a desk in the pentagon for almost two decades. I would question the independence of someone so well embedded and note nobody is resigning here, just moving to other offices.
Why would they resign? Their beef is with the government, not their employers
They didn't resign.
They turned in their badges that allows them to access certain spaces in the pentagon. They're still reporters, they still work for their employers, and they can still do reporting.
You're agreeing.
I don't think they should resign, I just want to be clear that this is taking a stand which won't cost them their pay.
I used to watch Donald Rumsfeld daily giving his briefing… the hardest questions asked to him by the beacons of democracy in the press corps was “how are you”.
> I remember how then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ecstatic after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, insisting that it showed the success of the U.S. invasion. Not long after, I ran into an officer at the Pentagon who told me, "No, Tom. It's not a success. Saddam Hussein's supporters are attacking our supply lines. Now, we have to send more troops back to guard them." That was because the United States, at Rumsfeld's insistence, never sent an adequate number of forces to Iraq to begin with — a fact another Army general warned me about, unsolicited — and I reported on, before the war even began.
> Instead of toeing the official line, that reporting helped people understand what U.S. troops were really facing. Far from being a success, the fall of Baghdad marked the beginning of an insurgency that stretched on for years.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g-s1-93297/pentagon-reporter-...
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Are we sure this isnt exactly what the current administration wants to happen? Less press so they can get away with more?
Well every step they do seems to be copy/pasted from North Korea.
Since nobody is protesting now you can expect that 5 years from now the regime will start making disappear people vaguely opposing the gov decisions or being suicided on a regular basis.
The government gets that even if journalists agree.
> Less press
War journalists will keep reporting. This just means the government’s position doesn’t get a say every time.
While what the government is doing more widely is quite scary, this in isolation seems sensible?
I don't really get what the journalists' role is? To goad and harass employees of the Department of defense in to slipping up and saying more than they should? To encourage people to leak information?
Given the secretive nature of the whole institution, It seems sensible that there is some formal process for deciding what information should and shouldn't be shared. The previous setup seems sort of insane.
If the army is putting babies on spikes and it needs to be leaked.. it seems that that should happen outside of the Pentagon itself and shouldn't involve getting some government approved badge...
Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?
Leaks and whistleblowers do not form in a vacuum. Less press means less oversight, fewer connections built, fewer threads pulled.
And even so, not all Pentagon business is all “life-and-death-top-secret”. Censorious governments LOVE the “national security” excuse.
Accountable in what sense? How are journalists trying to pry extra info from staff helpful? If they want to ask questions at press conferences and whatnot - as far as I understand they still can?
Free Press is part of checks and balances. If you are going to rely on leaks for this stuff to come out, you are going to have a bad time.
isn't what they're doing at the pentagon essentially getting people to leak stuff?
by questioning them publicly and holding them to account. That's not a leak. That's keeping people in check (or force them to lie in front of camera). Remove that and you only rely on Edward Snowdens of the world.
My understanding is they want off-the-record information from unnamed sources. These aren't public questions like at a press conference. Those can still occur under the current rules.
https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-...
"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."
Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.
I am so proud of the journalists for standing up to what is right.
It seems to me there is some hope for America after all.
These quotes are crazy to me, what kind of world are they living in?
> “I think he finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace,” Trump said. “The press is very dishonest.”
This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII, often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative. Both points were repopularised in the US around 2016 or so by Richard Spencer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer). For some reason both are now entering more mainstream usage among the right.
> often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative.
Am I alone in thinking that "woke" was the catch-all for the enemy this time around?
Yes, calling the media liars is a thing the Nazis did. However, it's not a good reason to equate someone with Nazis because lots of other people from all parts of the political spectrum have called the media liars from time to time. And a number of times, the media has even deserved it. I challenge anyone who disagrees to go take a dive in historical newspaper archives.
I'm not equating Richard Spencer with Nazis because of this. He's quite literally a white surpemacist and neo-nazi who wants to get rid of the Jews.
Exactly. He has many opinions a lot more characteristic to Nazis than "the media sucks".
Fox News and OAN are part of the press. Do you think they're honest?
Well, I wouldn't shut down or lock out any press. I wouldn't shut down Jewish-owned press either. All news and media is biased, and there's no such platonic ideal of honesty. Then again, I don't have "enemies" that I need to destroy so maybe you're asking the wrong person.
> This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII,
Presumably you mean "dishonest". Do you think OAN is dishonest and perhaps disruptive to world peace?
Thinking the press is dishonest does not make one a Nazi. Even if disliking the press were a sign if despotism, Clconsider what makes Nazism unique compared to other despotic regimes, disliking the press ain't it.
I don't think any free press is disruptive to world peace. Even if you get your wish and shut up any outlet you personally find dishonest you're not going to achieve world peace. At least not the kind I'd like to live in.
Wouldn't call Der Stürmer honest either.
No. They are propaganda outlets, and must not be considered separately from the Republican Party.
The current mechanism is
1) Fringe theory gestates in the internet.
2) Fringe theory gets into the podcast network and is covered
3) Relatively famous personality comes on a Fox program and mentions the theory
4) Government figures repeats theory that was covered on the news
5) Fox repeats government coverage
People on the right who have alternative theories, simply do not get air time. They aren’t suppressed, they are simply not competitive.
In a more economic framing of their efforts - they have found a way to offset the costs of inaccurate content to the future.
So they are now able to “sell” cheap “junk food” content, while the center and left spends more effort in forming more accurate content.
The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
But today the NYT is more a site dependent on its wordle revenue than its subscription revenue. Consolidation of markets means advertisers do not need smaller local newspapers, and platforms get the lions share of attention.
There is no business model to sustain a free information economy.
> The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
Up until about 2016 I would have agreed to this. After the last month or two, I don't see how a rational human can think this anymore. Neither side has any mainstream news outlet which tries to be honest in its reporting. You want facts? The talking heads have their own YouTube channels now. If you can find a decent selection of them, they provide more honest reporting and far better analysis than the media on either side provides currently.
> “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” 1984
It's always fun to compare Trump quotes against other presidential quotes.
Jefferson: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and 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."
Reagan: "There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our 'noble experiment' in self-government"
FDR: "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."
Trump: "The press is the enemy of the people."
Even more fun when we add the dimension for press ownership.
Who owned the presses when Jefferson or FDR or even Reagan discussed the role of the press; who owns it now?
Diversity and the (political/social) range of press is an important aspect of this matter.
And then there’s Nixon.
The issue comes in theory vs practice. Obviously in theory a free press is absolutely key to a free society, but in practice the press often ends up with different motivations. Another, rather more famous comment from Jefferson on the press [1]:
---
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]
---
[1] - https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
> what kind of world are they living in?
It’s projection, as usual.
Trust in the media is at an all time low [0]. You might be the one living in a crazy world where you trust everything the press says.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx
I'd be surprised if anyone believed everything the press said. It doesn't even seem possible as different press outlets will say conflicting things. But even if someone did, that isn't really an argument that a free press is an enemy of world peace so I'm not seeing how your point is related.
Let me try. About 125 years ago there was something called the Spanish-American war. It only lasted 4 days so most people forget about it. It was basically started by the press, specifically by Hurst. It is where we get the term 'yellow journalism'.
Basically the press claimed that the Spanish sabotaged a US navy ship called the USS Maine. The Maine had a boiler accident which caused it to explode but the press claimed it was the Spanish. The government used this as an excuse to take the remaining bits of Spain's empire away from them. So that might be an example of the press being 'an enemy of world peace'. No, I'm not sure the current media would do that. But it is an example of a free press starting a war to sell fish wrap.
This is what Trump has been saying for years. What exactly surprises you in this?
Doesn’t make it any less crazy
Fact check: True. You may prefer the dishonest press over world peace, but that does not make the claim wrong.
I'll take a a free press over an authoritarian controlled one any day. A boot stamping on a human face forever is not the kind of world peace I'm interested in, even if it's my boot. But I can understand the allure for a certain kind of person.
Our dishonest press is in no way mutually exclusive or in any way opposed to authoritarian control. And there is no right being violated here, at least not as far as we know. The courts may decide otherwise, but I don't think they have a right to this information above and beyond the existing FOIA system.
The Trump admin is the most transparent admin in decades and they provide much more access to the dishonest press than most admins.
Karoline, is that you and your machine gun lips?
https://youtu.be/iRk7YW5-Dvg
Edit: in case you believe I am being just flippant. That’s an illustration of the ”journalism” favoured by scammers.
You're European. You have zero excuse for buying into that ridiculous propaganda.
It's exactly because I know what our dishonest state-owned press reports about Trump and what they did report about Biden, and I also know what is happening in the US.
If Trump sneezes we find out that sneezing is something Hitler did, if Trump stops a war in Gaza we hear how one time Hitler talked about ending wars.
Our dishonest state-owned press is against wars except when Hamas loses, then they think that war may not have been that bad and want to tell us all the good things about war and the bad things about peace.
Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
> Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
You, uh, you do know this whole idea is right wing propaganda, right? None of that is what actually happened, it's what right wing media says happened.
So he didn’t get dropped?
“ The Trump admin is the most transparent admin in decades and they provide much more access to the dishonest press than most admins.”
Citation needed
Cabinet meetings with the press present, press is present at nearly every event, they have significantly more access to cabinet members.
I don't have actual numbers, but I know how often Biden spoke to the press, and I know it was always scripted on who can ask what.
Source: trust me, bro
Not really. Biden had a press pool like every president before them, and the press was free to disagree with him. He just didn't do interviews.
Trump's DoD just threatened to revoke press credentials of anyone who reported on things they didn't authorize. Also, the other current scandal is one of the people reporting on RFK both slept with him and gave him positive coverage, which is wild.
Trump regularly kicked reporters out of the press pool for saying things he didn't like and then took over deciding who can be in it and who isn't.
It's not really transparency if you make sure to include only people who promise to say what you want them to say, is it?
Are there any good-faith justifications for an American military censor?
They’ve started bombing fishermen, you tell me why they want one. It’s not in good faith.
> They’ve started bombing fishermen
The word you're looking for is 'murdering'.
Don't be silly. That's obviously what they meant. Not everyone is your enemy, relax.
Personally, I read it as added-emphasis rather than a retort against the author, but I can see how it could be taken that way depending on assumed verbal delivery.
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Funny jokes about extrajudicial killings, ha ha
Source: trust me bro.
What is the point of being a Journalist (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "write", word for word, the article they give you to publish?
If you identify sufficiently with the people giving you the article to publish, it's not a "they" but an "us". Even if the decisions are taken in rooms you don't have access to.
Maybe they think they'll get access to them eventually if they're loyal.
It might seem cowardly, but it isn't that different to what happens every day in business. Society is full of organisations working on the "make the boss' opinions your own" principle.
> If you identify sufficiently with the people giving you the article to publish
Then you aren’t a journalist.
You're never heard of biased or militant journalists have you?
In fact the most common form of journalism you will find is what's akin to a Propaganda channel of a Sponsoring Party (Defense, Media Company, Political party, Rich Individual with an agenda, etc). Essentialy a PR employee.
But this is true since always.
The kind of journalism we usually think of though is Investigative journalism, but that's a different beast and usually doesn't really pay.
Not a good journalist maybe, but if you identify too little with them, you probably don't even get to "sit where you're sitting", as Chomsky said.
> if you identify too little with them, you probably don't even get to "sit where you're sitting", as Chomsky said
The people winning White House credentials are political influencers. Chomsky was an interesting linguist. His political observations are about as scientific as our current crop of Silicon Valley elites’.
Scientific? That's neither here nor there.
What he said, and I agree is true and important, is that you won't get to work as a journalist and do things like, say, interview people for BBC, unless you believe most of the things your employer believes.
Chomsky's observations about how the media works may not have been solid science, but from the way you describe the present circumstance it really sounds like Chomsky is still on target.
What is the point of being a Developer (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "code", word for word, the feature specifications ("user stories") they give you to build?
They're still allowed to write whatever they want, they just won't be invited to Christmas parties anymore.
You mean they are cut of from an important source of information so the adminstration can always claim hearsay
I think people are being slightly hyperbolic. It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon. In general I think this is a good thing but not because I think it's a good idea. Rather, I think that the government, regardless of who happens to be in power, and the press should have an adversarial relationship, but the deep intertwining of the government and the press undermines this, even without corruption. You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.
> I think people are being slightly hyperbolic.
People are not being hyperbolic. This is reducing the transparency of Pentagon to the American people. See also the Whitehouse banning the AP earlier this year.
> It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon.
Without access it's going to be very hard to do good reporting, adversarial or otherwise. This is the government working to control what is said.
> You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
The world is built on relationships. One of the keys of being a good journalist/reporter is being able to have relationships which help to build stories while also staying objective.
> See also the Whitehouse banning the AP
Yeah, any "benefit of the doubt" burned away months ago.
The administration is trying to control published opinions and value-judgements, as opposed to concealing sensitive military data.
I get the same feeling, but I don't think I can justify the feeling.
IMO at best this is frogs* jumping out of water that was boiled too fast.
* an idiom based on a stupid truth, as the real frogs were sans-brain at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
>if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
Any information that isn't approved by Hegseth is unauthorized. In other words, only what Hegseth allows could be written.
To call the bad would be an understatement.
There is an updated draft of the rules from october 6th that rectifies this and some other prior issues.
I'm honestly not sure which rules the media outlets actually want changed.
There can always be good-faith justifications.
There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.
It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.
There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.
It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.
The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.
And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.
They want to use the journalists to spread their propaganda rather than have them uncover inconvenient facts.
With the blatant disregard for any rules and decorum, and a proven self-serving track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.
You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.
Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.
The rules were updated on Oct6 to allow media outlets to report using any information even if classified and unapproved for release, as long as they didn't solicit it or were given it with the premise that it won't be released.
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
This is a hyperbolic take. In countries with military censors, articles are submitted, from the newspaper's offices, to the censor's office for approval before publication. Nothing under this arrangement stops an American colonel from walking into the NYT's offices, dropping a folder at reception, and persuading the NYT to publish the contents of that folder. While it does prevent investigative journalism in the military, which is despicable on its own merits, the fact that it turns newspapers solely into PR outlets is neither new (i.e. as a general phenomenon in American media) nor limited to only the officially sanctioned point of view.
I like your reasoning. There’s nothing stopping a news outlet from publishing anything other than the clearly outlined consequences. In a similar vein there’s nothing stopping anybody from finding out what happens if you swallow a D battery but for some reason none of my friends are doing that
This is no different than pretty much any company. Do you think Apple lets reporters wander throughout their campus looking for new hardware, and allow them to ask engineers information about what they are working on? No. Apple does not let them wander around, and they advise all of their employees to never talk to press.
Hey you’re on a roll, don’t stop there. How does Apple respond to FOIA requests?
They’re not subject to FOIA you say? Perhaps there’s a difference to the organizations after all.
What possible relevance does what companies do have? I can't believe you're arguing this in good faith.
Apple doesn't demand ideological conformity from news oganizations before letting their reporters in, no.
Well, it kinda does. Reporters Apple doesn't like get cut off from early access, interviews etc.
However, Apple is a private company and can do whatever it pleases, however shitty that behavior is.
Apple doesn't require you to pay a significant portion of you paycheck to them either.
Unless you're a developer
If Apple had the ability to deploy military forces on behalf of my democratically elected government I'd actually be pretty concerned with them locking out the press too.
We've already seen Musk boasting about the CIA organising a coup for him, so it wouldn't surprise me
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/29/we-will-coup-whoever...
> We've already seen Musk boasting about the CIA organising a coup for him
I had a friend go deep into addiction. I think there was a period when every headline was his doing, too.
You are right, Apple should have its own nukes and bombers.
Apple is neither a state nor a democracy. The journalists and the government are there to aserve the same boss: the people. Now one of the people's employees sabotages the work the other employee.
Apple doesn't own a monopoly on violence. Your argument doesn't carry any weight.
Apple is a private company that answers to shareholders. The DoD is a government department that used to answer to the people.
I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answered to me (a US citizen) by its previous policy of letting a bunch of reporters from some mainstream news outlets have offices inside the Pentagon under one set of rules, and I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answers to me by its current policy of putting more rules on those reporters that they don't like and are willing to resign over. I have a healthy amount of mistrust for both the US military and mainstream US journalism operations, and I don't assume that the military-related stories these reporters covered previously were the ones that were actually important for me to know.
No one resigned.
Answering to the people doesn't mean that every secret must be made immediately public.
No one is suggesting that secrets be made public. The gov can and does classify info that must be kept secret.
Who is allowed to decide which secrets should or should not be made public?
If your answer is "the government", then every cover up will never be revealed, and the government will answer to no one.
If your answer is "journalists", then you have the status-quo in any functioning democracy.
And when it actually moves into sedition territory, that's what an independent court system is for.
Unfortunately, once things devolve into a two-party system, it becomes ever increasingly difficult to keep the various branches independent.
But it does require answers. Answers are a response to questions, otherwise they're just statements.
You have classified information for that reason. It's not the same as requiring journalists you literally let into public press conferences to shut up and spread propaganda unquestioningly
This is about not wanting the journalists to even ask for information from e.g. generals. No-one is saying that they want immediate disclosure of all secrets - I'm concerned that you're building a strawman.
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>Journalists asking for classified and sensitive information are acting in bad faifth.
How?
>They know that these people are not allowed to give away the information,
Not true, nor is everything is classified.
It appears you've not actually read the article, or what the new restrictions even asked for. You're acting as if journalists were allowed to go rummaging in office drawers and journalists dislike being told they can't do that anymore.
Or they could be trying to uncover malicious acts hidden behind classification. You may be too young or too old to understand, but historically it goes both ways.
I completely disagree. Their job is to uncover truths that may not be immediately obvious and they may not even know the classification status of sensitive information before asking about it. The military should instead say something like "that information is classified".
Why would the public want journalists to not even be able to ask the questions, never mind actually get the information?
This is moving the goal posts from your original position. Spend the time to refocus - if your position was erroneous, it was erroneous. Correct it, figure out what that means, then proceed.
Moving on to a new version is to waste your own intelligence in reactionary sentence creation.
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Despite all the fanfare, it is actually still DoD. The decree merely allowed the use of DoW as a "secondary title".
https://www.ngaus.org/newsroom/president-renames-dod-departm...
Fuck that, it’s DoD until Congress changes it.
No it isn't.
no, actually that requires congressional approval, and the government is currently shut down, mostly as a way to defer the release of the Epstein files. nice try, though.
> mostly as a way to defer the release of the Epstein file
How many disappointments will it take for people to realize there isn't any more there there than what's already been found?
Or are the Epstein files are going to be what the minority party rambles about from now on instead of having a coherent message?
Should be quite simple to release them and move on then, that will be great.
But then they can't release them at a convenient time to distract from something much bigger. Which I'm afraid they will, eventually.
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> there isn't any more there there than what's already been found?
I thought this until seeing Trump look completely guilty every time it comes up, and the GOP leadership mobilizing to stop the release of the files.
For Apple that makes sense as there are financial damages. Can/should the US be able to sue for defamation if the claims aren't libel?
Governments are companies now? The capitalism brain rot is in its final stages
Ah, "We are currently clean on OPSEC"
We are currently clean on triple sec
a rare instance of american journalists showing spine.
What's next? Asking hard questions, or follow up questions?
If Trump says "I've ended 7 or 8 wars" or says "I've lowered drug prices 800, 900, 1000 percent" and no one says
"Sir, how is it possible to lower a price by 900 percent" or "Could you specify which conflicts it is you refer to by those 7 or 8 wars?" then you aren't a journalist.
If you go to an event where such things are said and there is no opportunity to ask these obvious follow up questions, then you stop going there, or you aren't a journalist.
If someone asks these questions and that leaves them excluded from those events - then you also stop going there in solidarity, or you aren't a journalist.
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The American people need to start prosecuting their war criminals, plain and simple - and this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court.
The notion that American exceptionalism inoculates America's war criminals from facing justice at the hand of International bodies set up specifically for that purpose, is incorrect and anti-human.
It is time for justice.
You can't maintain this culture of warrior narcissism, Americans.
It will end in tragedy - as it has already brought chaos and calamity to millions of innocent people across the globe, this century. The USA and its allies are, by a huge margin, the #1 cause of terror and war on the planet at this time. Nobody even comes close to the level of criminal war-mongering that occurs at the behest of the US' political establishment. No, not Russia. Not China. The USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none.
Come to grips with the crimes of your state. It is the #1 most important thing for Americans to do, for the rest of the world.
The American people are the only force on the planet which can reign in their monsters. It has to be done by the people, for the people.
> this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court
Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. It’s not appropriate for great powers, whether that be America or China.
We need to deal with this domestically. With our own laws. In our own courts.
> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none
Ah, got it.
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In my opinion the role of the press is NOT to spin the narrative but to report objectively and contextualise the reported information, ask critical questions with the aim to uncover inefficiency, injustice etc. Sadly the media, at least the big one do little if that lately and rather feed on hollow sensations empty of information or critical reflection but generating clicks.
You are confusing journalism with media. That make your whole rant wrong from the beginning.
There is no such difference in practice. I'm sorry for your delusion here.
Mandatory: "YouTube Commentators Fallacy" https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-offensive-truth
You're calling anyone who bothers to reply to you dumb and delusional. The plea for rational debate is a bit funny in this context.
Yours isn't a rational argument, you are just barking stuff. You ended your comment with "End of story", ffs.
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...sigh.
My dude, I agree with the point you were making in the original comment before you edited it. But if you write aggressive comments with no room for discussion, you can't be surprised when people just downvote you.
I am 12 and this is deep
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Please stop, your enlightened contrarian takes are blowing my little 12 year old mind.
Rational argument: the government has lied innumerable times. The reason we know about a handful of them is journalism. If you want your spin straight from the tap, you can read press releases on the DoD website. If you want critical analysis, verification, and other perspectives you’re gonna need a healthy fifth estate. Journalists have biases, but so do governments.
The media is called the fourth estate (not 5th). A 5th column would be more like sleeper cells.
And the media lies at least as much as our government. That's why ratings are so far down. They have burned their credibility that previous generations of journalists spent decades building up.
That is only part of the story, not the full story, where journalists and CIA analysts get together and determine the truth. you've seen the video Snowden posted about this? It is a known reality. Why hide it behind the facade of a free press? There are many dimensions to this story, including Zionist bias by mainstream "journalists" that told you there was no genocide and Israel is a victim, and they've kept up that lie even after the UN declared it a genocide.
Sorry, but demanding arguments against your baseless accusations?
Another brick in the wall
That's not what the song is about. Its about mental illness. Pink was shutting out the world, one brick at a time.
Not at the time but they later said it could be applied to more
In (Part One), sure.
In (Part Two) it was external actors laying bricks that isolated Waters' protaganist, and in (Part Three) cause passes the Rubicon as everyone and everything is lumped together as just more bricks in the wall.
Pathetic posturing.
With an access badge, at least you can leak something important anonymously.
> With an access badge, at least you can leak something important anonymously
You think generals leak to journalists at press conferences?
Why is this on HN?
Because it's interesting. We don't need to censor everything.
The news article is interesting, but political discussions on HN rarely are.
Good. Journalist should not have some special access compared to your any person off the street. Such things only lead to un-democratic ends.