The Pentagon’s new restrictions will bar correspondents covering the American military from covering the American military, as the Trump regime attempts to exert full-spectrum control over media.
Pete Hegseth at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA. (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
It should be evident by now to anyone paying even casual attention that exerting full-spectrum control over American media is among the Trump regime’s most perniciously obsessive projects.
Of all the extra-constitutional messes this vulgar ignoramus is making, I count his assaults on media his gravest attempt to destroy what remains of American democracy and what little chance there may be to restore it.
There are all sorts of cases in point. President Trump has a citizen’s right to file lawsuits against various media — ABC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Paramount Global (the parent of CBS News) — but to call these anything other than an antidemocratic assertion of executive power is out of the question.
Lately there are the threats of Brendan Carr, the mad-dog chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to take licenses away from broadcasters whose reportage and commentary are not to Trump’s liking.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” saith Carr when he forced ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air (temporarily, it turned out) for a few utterly harmless remarks the late-night host made after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the influential conservative.
What a ridiculous comment from a ridiculous man, what a capricious display of authoritarian power. This is a war on media the Trump regime intends to wage on many fronts, to finish this pencil-sketch of the landscape.
President Donald Trump with Hegseth during a Cabinet meeting on April 30, 2025. (White House / Molly Riley)
What is to my mind the most portentous attack yet on media of all sorts and what little independence remains among the mainstream variety came a couple of weeks ago, when the Defense Department announced severe new restrictions on journalists covering the Pentagon.
To put the case simply, these rules will bar correspondents covering the American military from covering the American military.
My mind goes first to Jefferson’s famous remark in 1787, while serving as the young United States’ minister in Paris.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” he wrote to Edward Carrington, a prominent Virginian and a friend, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Taking the Pentagon’s new restrictions on their own terms and also as a harbinger, Trump and Pete Hegseth, his buffoonish defense secretary, appear intent on delivering Americans to that condition Jefferson warned against 238 years ago.
Turning his question another way, I remind readers of W.E.B. DuBois, Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers, the James brothers (William and Henry), and other critics of the American imperium as it emerged at the end of the 19th century. There will be empire abroad or democracy at home, they asserted with a sort of desperate alarm, but Americans will not have both.
Considered in this context, Hegseth, with Trump’s evident approval, has just nodded in favor of this argument. Operating the late-phase imperium, Hegseth effectively advises Americans, requires the sequestration of power from public scrutiny.
The document announcing the Defense Department’s new restrictions on correspondents covering the American military runs to 17 pages; a covering letter signed by Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, describes it as “implementing the Secretary of War [sic] memorandum, ‘Updated Physical Control Measures for Press/Media Access Within the Pentagon,’ dated May 23, 2025.”
Note the date. By mid–May Pentagon correspondents had reported that Hegseth was using unsecured internet lines to conduct classified business and had brought his wife, brother, and personal attorney into a chat room where a top-secret aerial attack on Yemen was under discussion. A few days after that it was reported that he had invited Elon Musk to a briefing on potential war plans against China.
Hegseth under fire for bringing wife Jennifer to meetings. (YouTube CLRCUT, screenshot)
This guy had a lot of stupidity and incompetence to cover up. And the restrictions Hegseth authorized in May, detailed in the memorandum dated Sept. 18 and due to come into effect over the next few days, reek of the sort of revenge — against Democrats, against the universities, against the courts, against the media — that seems to rule within the Trump regime.
How damaging to our tattered republic, you have to conclude, are the petty vendettas of these thankfully passing people.
These new restrictions are beyond Draconian. Journalists covering the Pentagon are to be required to pledge not to report anything, anything at all, that has not been explicitly authorized by a department official. They will not be allowed even to gather information without such authorization. Access even to unclassified information will be limited to occasions “when there is a lawful government purpose for doing so.”
Reporters assigned to cover the Defense Department will now have to take pledges to get in the Pentagon’s front door? Just how far are these people going to go? This reminds me of the loyalty oaths required of federal employees during the McCarthyist 1950s.
Roughly 90 journalists cover the Pentagon at any given time. They will henceforth be restricted even from walking most of the building’s halls without an escort. “Failure to abide by these rules,” the memorandum warns, “may result in suspension or revocation of your building pass and loss of access.”
This is pretty close to Soviet, in my estimation.
“Journalists covering the Pentagon are to be required to pledge not to report anything, anything at all, that has not been explicitly authorized by a department official…. Access even to unclassified information will be limited…”
Hegseth took to social media the day these restrictions were issued to journalists and, so, reported in their media. “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon,” he declared to all, “the people do.”
Tell me if this is not altogether Soviet.
It would be difficult to overstate the gravity of these measures. Taken to their extreme, and to go by the hyper-officious phrasing of the Sept. 18 memorandum the extreme is what Hegseth’s Pentagon has in mind, once these regulations go live the conduct of the imperium will no longer be visible to the public.
The imposition of total control of information — and so of all “narratives” — and the concealment of all conduct: These are the all-but-stated objectives. We are looking at unlimited prerogative and the strictest enforcement of secrecy, to describe this new regime another way. At this early moment I find it hard to imagine the extent of the lawlessness this may turn out to license.
I start to think the Trump II regime’s relations with media exceed the corruptions of the Cold War decades, and this is going some. But no president then was as brutishly ignorant and as indifferent to the Constitution as Trump. The imperium was on the ascendant during those first post–1945 decades; now it is bankrupt (in lots of ways) and obviously on the wane. The game is bound to get rougher as strength gives way to weakness.
But let me pose a question, disturbed as I am by Pete Hegseth’s latest display of authoritarianism mixed with ineptitude. In promulgating these severe new restrictions on those assigned to cover the national security state, has the Trump regime merely codified practices that have long been observed but until now left unwritten?
Doing bluntly and openly what previous presidential regimes have done surreptitiously is (part of) what makes Donald Trump dangerous, but it is also, if you see what I mean, his virtue: The Trumpster puts it all out in the open. Think for a moment about the language of the Sept. 18 memorandum, as quoted above: Observe the rules or suffer “loss of access.”
Every journalist who has ever had lunch in Washington understands what is meant by “the access game” and how it works. You produce work that pleases the sources upon whom you rely or they stop speaking to you and you are shut out. Getting shut out is not considered useful among one’s editors. Ditto the correspondent who has lost his sources.
Writing the access game into enforceable regulations is not to be dismissed as anything short of dangerous to the remnants of American democracy. But there is nothing new about the game, and very, very few correspondents in Washington prove able to resist playing it.
There has been lots of coverage of the Hegseth rules since the memorandum was distributed in the Pentagon press room. But I have heard no formal protest from publishers and executive editors, no rejections, no refusals to accept these preposterous limitations, no threats to boycott.
My guess, informed by long years “laboring in the vineyards,” as one of my editors used to put it: Mainstream media will accept these rules and play by them, so making themselves participants in this latest corruption of the press and broadcasters as an independent pole of power. This is what makes them mainstream, after all.
Remember during the First Gulf War, when correspondents had to “embed” with military units, so giving the army control over what they saw and thus what they reported? There were few voices of objection raised — an appalling, gutless dereliction of the press’s responsibilities.
“My guess … Mainstream media will accept these rules and play by them, so making themselves participants in this latest corruption of the press.”
I hope I am wrong, but it looks to be the same thing again in my read. Those covering the Pentagon will henceforth be embedded in the America military’s command center, simple as that.
At the horizon the question comes down to where journalists stand in relation to the power they are supposed to report upon and, on the other hand, to their readers and viewers. This has been a matter of debate since Walter Lippmann and John Dewey faced off on it a century ago.
I wrote of “the Lippmann–Dewey debates,” which were not actually debates, at length in Journalists and Their Shadows, which came out in late 2023, so here I will be brief.
Lippmann, high priest of the cult of the expert, saw journalists as appendages of sequestered elites, and they were to serve as messengers conveying all decisions downward. Dewey argued that policy and other such matters must be subject to public deliberation; media’s task was to inform the public of all available perspectives such that sound judgments could be made.
Lippmann argued for less democracy, Dewey for more: This was the gist of the debates in which the two engaged by way of their books and their reviews of each other’s.
The Cold War turned journalists, with a few honorable exceptions, into a herd of cowardly Lippmannites. After an attenuated step in the other direction — in the 1960s and 1970s, approximately — they have served as Lippmannites through and through since the attacks of September 2001.
Pete Hegseth has decreed a radical departure in professional practice for journalists covering the national security state. True and highly condemnable.
Pete Hegseth has codified long-established practices and a longstanding relationship between the press and power. True and highly condemnable.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Mr Lawrence’s assessment that we are now seeing “the most portentous attack yet on media” displays a certain naivete. For the past 10 years especially, the media has increasingly been under the cosh. Consider: from at least 2015, FBI agents were embedded at Twitter with their own Slack group; during the covid circus we had censorship by decree often emanating directly from the White House; fantastic news “stories” like the Russia Hoax were manufactured & placed in the public sphere; a sitting US president was literally banned from a major social media site. The terms “de-platforming” and “cancelling” emerged & were justified in the name of combatting “misinformation”, often utterly destroying people’s lives.
In the face of all this, the behaviour of the mainstream media (MSM) has been a parody of how a vibrant media in a democracy ought to function. They cheered on the censorship, jeered at the cancelled and egged on the false narratives. When a dementia patient was foisted on Americans as president, the MSM produced solemn tracts about him and his appointments of laughably inept individuals chosen purely as a virtue-signalling exercise. Anyone who pointed out that the country was clearly being run by others & this might be a grave abuse of executive power was loudly sneered at. And when that ruse could no longer stand up, the MSM wildly supported an utter half-wit – the “joy” candidate – whose only known skills were cackling & quaffing Chardonnay.
The real question then, is whether this kind of media is worth preserving at all? I gave up on them a long time ago and pick my way through worthwhile, independent media – like Consortium News – in order to make up my own mind.
Difficult for me to distinguish who is the craziest, trump the 800lb elephant in the room, Hogsbreath who appears to be on acid constantly looking to 000 (47) for approval and raving like a boy scout – on acid or Steve Miller who everyone knows cannot be trusted at all for any reason. The guy must have been born with that guilty look on his face.
Of the three I would have to believe Hogsbreath is mst likely to engage in homicidal activity with Miller holding his knives for him!
Could be just my loathing for all things republican at this point in time.
Trump and Hegseth demanded partisan political loyalty from the assembled Generals, spelling out that they would be required to defeat Democrats, “the enemy within,” on US streets.
With the US government financial shut down in place a number of Federal departments have sent out emails and posted websites falsely claiming that the Democrats are responsible. This is an open breach of the Hatch Act which prohibits government departments from engaging in political conduct. There are already signs that Trump intends to use the shutdown to massively sack government employees and use the military to control civil dissent.
hxxps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/30/federal-agencies-democrats-shutdown
When our family moved to a Southern California town in 1955, my mother, a kindergarten teacher, was asked by the school to sign a ‘loyalty oath’. I remember my parents discussing this anomalous request, but of course, she signed it as she needed the job. The McCarthy years were no picnic, either, and I don’t like seeing their return, but on steroids!
Those tattoos on his arm are very revealing – reminiscent of a certain 1930s German ideology!
Thank you for this insightful and much needed comment: “But let me pose a question, disturbed as I am by Pete Hegseth’s latest display of authoritarianism mixed with ineptitude. In promulgating these severe new restrictions on those assigned to cover the national security state, has the Trump regime merely codified practices that have long been observed but until now left unwritten?
Doing bluntly and openly what previous presidential regimes have done surreptitiously is (part of) what makes Donald Trump dangerous, but it is also, if you see what I mean, his virtue: The Trumpster puts it all out in the open. Think for a moment about the language of the Sept. 18 memorandum, as quoted above: Observe the rules or suffer “loss of access.”
It is my sense that the history of prior Presidents/Administrations has been swept under the proverbial rug while they were in office and after. This ignoring of the egregious earlier policies, closed door activities, etc. has clearly, step by step, made what we are witnessing possible. The deep, significant flaws in the structures and processes of our ‘democracy’ (such as it is), the UN, ICC, ICJ are being exposed. However, if not addressed … I hesitate to think what the future holds.
“The Cold War turned journalists, with a few honorable exceptions, into a herd of cowardly Lippmannites. After an attenuated step in the other direction — in the 1960s and 1970s, approximately — they have served as Lippmannites through and through since the attacks of September 2001.
“Pete Hegseth has decreed a radical departure in professional practice for journalists covering the national security state. True and highly condemnable.
“Pete Hegseth has codified long-established practices and a longstanding relationship between the press and power. True and highly condemnable.”
The first graf and the next two statements don’t really compute.
Hegseth isn’t actually making things worse.
Trump is just saying the quiet part out loud.
This is, actually, a win for the American people.
To solve a problem you must define it correctly.
Like the genocide in Gaza, the Hegseth pronunciamentos rip off the veil.
This makes it much easier to define the problem (which is actually the consolidation of the American media, most of which occurred under Clinton, and not the secretiveness of the Pentagon).
The more Americans lose faith in and turn away from the degenerate, dishonest, and unreliable MSM, which has ginned up war after war after war with lies, the better off the country will be.
The result of this of course is hardly anyone will believe what they are told by official sources. The reputation of the mainstream media is already abysmal due to the collusion with the state that already exists. It will not rise from this low point, but fall to rock bottom. People find other ways to share information when the state restricts the normal routes.
We are in for a scary time. Maybe even hellish. Not sure I even plan to stick around to see the outcome. But eventually, this regime will fall for the same reasons all fascist regimes fall. They are unsustainable.
War on the Media?
Surely, looking back 236 years pre the force of the law of the U.S. Constitution, “newspapers without government”Jefferson being a slave owner, would have been his obvious choice.
However, the apparently not as obvious today is that Trump’s intention is total reversion of said constitution.
It’s more about ‘full spectrum fascism’ than simply curtailment of freedom of speech.
Shouldn’t the last word be “commendable” actually? After all, as the author says:
“Doing bluntly and openly what previous presidential regimes have done surreptitiously is (part of) what makes Donald Trump dangerous, but it is also, if you see what I mean, his virtue”
It truly is a commendable act and perhaps a step in our path out of the national security state dead end we are mired in to be so open with the always existing corruption of the MSM. The crap we heard on Fox and CNN and MSDNC was always govt approved pablum; but now there will be no pretense or possibility of it being anything else.
This news bursts my seams! This must be fought tooth and nail. If we the people bear the burden of paying for our oligarchic neo-conservative conceived wars to protect their pecuniary interests, then we damn well better get the right to witness how are hard earned (and increasingly hard earned ) money is being spent. Even more salient. These men and women in OUR military are OUR children, wives, husbands, uncles and aunties. These are the humans whose blood is up to be shed. We have a right as family of these cherished relatives to know what in hell the military is doing! Hegseth’s adolescence and his adolescent mindset suggests he never experienced boundaries. Those limits forcing each of us to dig down into our roots to find our true substance and through life’s struggles mature into wisdom. He’s a fly-boy totally unfit for the dimensions of his responsibility to OUR Constitution who’s infatuated with the dubious nectar of power personified – for his severely limited and jaundiced latitude and depth – in a felon who is as devoid of emotional intelligence as he is loaded with cognitive stupidity and impotent masculinity manifesting in the not so incremental intentional disintegration of democratic structures that served Us and made civic life more fair and just.
I am convinced that Pete Hegseth’s problem is he eats too much meat. I spent years as a Zen cook in an American Zen Buddhist temple and I observed how diet affects people. Of course, Trump eats a strange diet. In short, both men do not know how to live and the people suffer the consequences of their greed and stupidity.
Why don’t the media say to the politicians we are not going to your garden party anymore to listen to your lies.
Because they really really LOVE garden parties …
Bacause the media are mainly owned by the wealthy, who for the most part are well-served by the politicians’ lies. The owning classes, IOW, mostly **agree** with these lies.
A great case in point is today’s NYT top editorial, which responds to yesterday’s Trump-Netanyahu “peace plan.” While many people have the impression that the Times “hates” Trump, you will see, in reading this editorial, that they actually agree with him, in most ways. The editorial paints a picture of the Gaza war (actually, the word “massacre” or “genocide” would be more apt) that makes Israel out to be the “good guy” and Hamas, to be the “villain” that supposedly “started” the war, for no good reason. Like Trump, the Times thinks that the 50 or so Israeli hostages are more important than the hundred thousand or so Palestinians Israel has already murdered. (The NYT uses the lowball official estimate of 60,000.)
Sure, the NYT doesn’t like Trump’s personality, and would rather have someone like Biden in charge. But as for matters of substance, the Times (and the media generally) actually agree with much of what Trump says and does, even if they’re not wild about how he says it (because they fear it makes America look bad, in the eyes of the rest of the world).
I understand that years ago, journalists were all working class men and women. Now, it appears that a journalist career appeals to the sons and daughters of the PMC, and so are loyal, like their parents, to the owning class.
Why, indeed? For the same reason the media attend these God-awful White House press conferences and and fight to be called upon by a sycophantic press secretary who then abuses and humiliates them rather than answer their questions. For the same reason they clammer to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. For “access.” To see, be seen and hopefully get picked to be used by those in power. Apparently, any access is better than no access, even access that is not really access at all. It is all the inevitable by-product of a corporatized media that is little more the newsletter of the ruling class. Lippman’s view won out.
“Things We Used To Say About The Soviet Union” should be the title of a short book that lists all the BAD things we learned about the Soviet Union 60 years, and ask ourselves if all those bad things aren’t true about the US today.
Agree, and worse in going to war on the other side of the globe. But we may jail and torture our whistleblowers, while Russia kills them. We still have room to grow.
Of course, while non-lethal imprisonment, torture, and other methods of dealing with dissidents and inconvenient witnesses may be far more typical (a variation on how people such as Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elena Milashina, Maria Alyokhina, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have been dealt with in the USSR / Russia), figures tied to the MICIMATT in the United States have also just as credibly been accused of complicity in murdering the likes of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Rose Cheramie, Fred Hampton, Karen Silkwood, Rudy Lozano, Don Henry and Kevin Ives, Danny Casolaro (and numerous others connected to the Inslaw / “Octopus” case), Kenneth Michael Trentadue, Michael Hastings, etc. as those tied to the Soviet / Russian power elite have in myriad other cases.
At the same time, for as authoritarian and even totalitarian as the Soviet / Russian political system is and has been, power and political agency is more diffusely distributed there than much Western commentary is typically wont to acknowledge (e.g., the case of the Chief Administration of Trade [Glavtorg] and the Administration of the Moscow Fruit and Vegetable Office [Glavmosplodovoshprom] effectively winning institutional battles against the KGB and the Kremlin during the Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko eras as recounted in works such as Luc Duhamel’s “The KGB Campaign against Corruption in Moscow, 1982-1987,” Joe Weisberg’s “Russia Upside Down,” etc. is a potentially instructive one).
My sense is that American knowledge of the Soviet Union is a mixture of propaganda and reality. The reality is that the USSR was existentially threatened by the Americans, which can affect political life. At any rate, Patrick Lawrence’s “Tell me if this is not altogether Soviet” clearly equates Soviet with ‘BAD’.
“Pete Hegseth has codified long-established practices and a longstanding relationship between the press and power. True and highly condemnable.”
Wait, what is condemnable, the long-established practices or codifying them? What is more condemnable?
Without Donald Trump, the press and power work together, in a symbiotic relationship.
With Donald Trump, the power is split into the establishment (the “deep state”, which I’m sure includes most of the Pentagon) and the “MAGA” clique of Trump loyalists in the government. The press and the establishment are still in the symbiotic relationship, while the press and MAGA are antagonistic.
This is all perfectly obvious, right? So, why are you so upset by Hegseth’s antics, instead of real corruption? Hegseth will punch journos, journos will punch Hegseth; everything looks fine as far as Hegseth is concerned. Leave him alone for now, will ya?
If the Richmond Hill Mental Hospital of St. George’s; and the isthmian communities of El Chorrillo, San Miguelito, and Pacora; and the “Highway of Death,” and so on, fall to indiscriminate bombardment, but no one is around to record their fates, do their inhabitants even make a sound?
“There were media complaints right from the start of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. For example, not quite a month after the Iraqis overran Kuwait and three weeks after George Bush dispatched the first American ground troops to Saudi Arabia, there came a bitter protest from Michael Gartner, president of NBC News. On the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal (August 30, 1990), he wrote, ‘Here’s something you should know about that war [sic] that’s going on in the Gulf: much of the news that you read or hear or see is being censored. . . . There is no excuse for this kind of censorship [which] exceeds even the most stringent censorship of World War II.’ The press was shut out of Grenada, he wrote, ‘cooped up in Panama, and put on the late plane [carrying the Pentagon press pool] into Saudi Arabia.'”
Source:
“Foreword by Peter Braestrup,” pp. x-xi, in John J. Fialka, “Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)
—
“At the time, the TV Gulf War must have seemed to many viewers a perfect Baudrillardian simulacrum, a hyperreal scenario in which events lose their identity and signifiers fade into one another. […] It was not the first time that images of war had appeared on TV screens, but it was the first time that they were relayed ‘live’ from the battlefront. It was not the first occasion on which the military censored what could be reported, but it did involve a new level of military control of reportage and images. Military planners had clearly learnt a great deal since Vietnam: procedures for controlling the media were developed and tested in the Falklands, Grenada and Panama. As a result, what we saw was for the most part a ‘clean’ war, with lots of pictures of weaponry, including the amazing footage from the nose-cameras of ‘smart bombs,’ and relatively few images of human casualties, none from the Allied forces. In the words of one commentator, for the first time, ‘the power to create a crisis merges with the power to direct the movie about it … Desert Storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that made instant history.'”
Source:
“Introduction,” p. 3, in Jean Baudrillard, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991)
The Vietnam War had relatively open reporting and the reports and images appearing in homeland papers from US journalists in Vietnam turned the public against the war. To avoid that happening again, the Pentagon ever since has restricted journalist’s access.
Indeed.
Ironically, the late Peter Braestrup (former 1968-73 Saigon bureau chief for The Washington Post) blamed the media’s coverage of the Tet Offensive for lowering US morale, thereby compromising military objectives and ultimately leading to their withdrawal from Vietnam, in his 1977 book “Big Story,” which almost certainly contributed to bringing about the situation that Fialka and himself bemoan in “Hotel Warriors” (though, to my mind, the extensive numbers of draftees ending up as demoralized damaged goods or worse, coupled with the eventual disclosure of the Pentagon Papers that had already been foreshadowed by Daniel Ellsberg’s early encounters with Neil Sheehan and Anthony Russo in 1965-66, likely meant that there was little that the media could have done but slightly delay inevitable realizations regarding the intractability of Vietnamese resistance to the US and its allies).
The close of the first paragraph of the article would more conclusively read: “with full spectrum fascism”.
The phrase “the first casualty of WAR is truth” means that during WAR, accurate reporting and factual information are sacrificed in favour of propaganda and narratives that serve the WAR effort. Pete Hegseth is now the Secretary of WAR. There is no surprise concerning his first casualty. Truth is dead.
Correpondents will have to use back door, off premises and undergroiund sources and avoid the US territory. The Pentagon does not rule over the BBC or AFP. Hopefully they can cultivate sources and learn what the USDOW doesnt want them to publish. All 800 generals and admirals will not support a news blackout. They all have clerks and clerks know a lot more than their bosses.