Raging at Media, Pete Hegseth Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

Pete Hegseth wants to live in a world in which the American military can drop bombs on scores of schoolchildren and not face serious media scrutiny over it. And he just might get that world soon enough.

That’s the only way to understand the defense secretary’s extraordinary outburst on Friday morning. He lashed out at news organizations, criticizing headlines that aren’t sufficiently praiseworthy of American military successes in the Iran war.

“I know that everything is written intentionally,” Hegseth said of the media, referring to his own previous stint as a Fox News contributor, thus seemingly admitting that Fox, at least, does deliberately skew coverage. He faulted numerous headlines, insisting that rather than report things like “Mideast War Intensifies,” the press should instead be “patriotic” and write headlines like: “Iran Increasingly Desperate.”

The visibly angry Hegseth also ridiculed a CNN story reporting that Trump’s war planners “underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz.” He added: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

That’s a direct reference to Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is acquiring CNN after taking over and creating a more Trump-friendly CBS. In short, Hegseth openly relishes future oligarchical control of the media to ensure more dutiful amplification of his propaganda.

Here’s video, via Aaron Rupar:

Where to begin? First, Hegseth is playing games around that CNN story. He claimed it’s “patently ridiculous” because Iran “always” threatens to choke off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He fumed: “CNN doesn’t think we thought of that.”

But much of the CNN report details how officials underestimated Iran’s willingness to act on the threat of closure. It also details how Trump officials failed to sufficiently plan for the consequences of closing it, and why that insufficient planning took place. It’s obviously true that this happened. Media scrutiny of those failings is what Hegseth actually objects to.

Then there’s Hegseth’s claim that a “patriotic” press should primarily pump up American battlefield wins. This essentially demands that the media dispense with its adversarial role toward power. We don’t have to look far to see how malicious this demand truly is.

Take the reporting on the bombing of an Iranian elementary school with scores of children inside who have reportedly been killed—a central event in this conflict and potentially one of the worst atrocities in modern memory. On February 28, the day the war started, The New York Times painstakingly laid out evidence suggesting the United States was likely responsible. It followed up with more. Reuters disclosed that American investigators also concluded the U.S. role was likely. The Associated Press revealed that the bombing might have reflected faulty intelligence. All this reporting was careful and nuanced.

Hegseth is irritated with that scrutiny too. On Friday, he confirmed that an investigation of the bombing is underway but added this absurdity: “We’re not going to let reporting lead us or force our hand into indicating what happened.”

So let’s state this clearly: A key reason we want media scrutiny and fact finding is precisely that it will, in fact, put pressure on official inquiries like this one. Hegseth suggested the military can do this itself. But remember, Trump blithely declared early on that Iran had bombed its own school. Then he admitted to reporters that he’d said this without knowing the facts. As Jennifer Rubin notes, it’s ironic that this admission too was shaken loose by more of the skillful media questioning that Hegseth disdains.

At the best of times, we can’t depend on government officials to hold themselves accountable. That’s the reason for innovations like independent inspectors general. Under Trump, there is even less reason to trust the government to do a good-faith accounting, given his boundless contempt for the truth.

But Hegseth wants a world in which a horror like this can unfold, and rather than the media digging in hard to ferret out known facts on a moment-to-moment basis, we all just sit back and let his handpicked investigator tell us what happened—at some point down the road.

The biggest scandals in U.S. history, such as Watergate, have played out in a cat-and-mouse way, with the press corps’ digging putting pressure on other institutional actors to do their part in ensuring that the truth wins out. During wars especially, we want to know if officials and combatants are adhering to rules, laws, and codes of conduct, given the awesome power of the U.S. military—and the tendency of war to produce unspeakable horrors.

Which brings us to the ultimate point here: Hegseth himself has declared open contempt for “rules of engagement.” Compounding the hall-of-mirrors effect, we don’t know what this has even meant in practice. As the Times’ Charlie Savage notes, there are many unanswered questions about the role Hegseth’s laxness played in the school bombing:

What standards of certainty were imposed on planners for the strikes for vetting and validating potential targets? Does Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statement that he gave the military “maximum authority on the battlefield,” compared with the practice in past wars, mean the standards were formally lowered? Whatever the rules were on paper, did such comments contribute to a culture of moving faster and with less care—of “no hesitation,” in his words—among the planners, resulting in negligence or recklessness?

You can draw a direct line from Hegseth’s disdain for rules of engagement right to his contempt for the role of an adversarial press. He apparently doesn’t want those questions answered, either: Once CNN is taken over by Ellison (whose CBS is a network that Hegseth happens to like), there will be less scrutiny and more hagiography—by Hegseth’s own telling.

Hegseth is not disguising any of this. He wants the press to elevate American battlefield triumphs, something he chooses to call “patriotic.” But real patriotism requires demanding that the country live up to higher ideals. Hegseth’s conduct reveals exactly why we don’t want networks like CNN to fall into the hands of his preferred media masters, not why we do.