Media correspondent and analyst Brian Stelter argued that President Donald Trump was most likely unaware of a new controversial policy announced by his own Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after the president uttered contradictory remarks on Sunday.
On Friday, the Pentagon announced that journalists would be required to sign a pledge not to obtain or report on any information not officially disseminated by the Pentagon, lest they lose their credentials. On Sunday, however, when asked whether he thought the Pentagon should be able to decide “what reporters can report on,” Trump said “no, I don’t think so.”
The only explanation for Trump’s contradictory remarks, Stelter argued, would be that the president was clueless as to his own DOD’s policy.
“My best guess is that President Trump didn't know about this new Pentagon plan because that answer makes him sound like he's on a very different page from his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, [who] all year long has been trying to limit independent news coverage of the Pentagon, of the U.S. military,” Stelter said, speaking on CNN Monday.
“Hegseth's press office has booted some news outlets, including CNN from longtime Pentagon work spaces, and has brought in pro-Trump news outlets instead. We've also seen efforts to restrict where reporters can travel within the Pentagon complex, but now, this new memo is, by far, the most severe restriction yet.”
Journalists have pushed back against the policy, many of whom have argued it violates the core tenets of the First Amendment, and would effectively cripple the ability of Pentagon reporters to do their job.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former Pentagon reporter himself, said that the matter was “very close to me,” and that the policy was antithetical to journalism itself.
“I spent several years as a Pentagon correspondent during the first Gulf War, and it's hard for me to believe that Pentagon reporters would lose their credentials, lose their opportunity to report from the Pentagon even if they reported some innocuous statement that hadn't been formally announced by the Pentagon,” Blitzer said. “Forget about classified information, this is unclassified information.”