Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Press Crackdown Gets Absolutely Walloped on Fox News by Retired General

Retired General and former Vice Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army Jack Keane was bluntly critical of the Pentagon’s new press restrictions Tuesday, telling Fox News anchor Bret Baier this was an improper attempt to “spoon-feed information” to journalists.

The new policy announced by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sparked immediate outrage from the Pentagon Press Association as an “unprecedented message of intimidation,” including the threat of criminal prosecution and the demand that reporters get approval from Department of Defense officials before publication.

The vast majority of broadcast and cable news networks — including conservative ones like Fox News and Newsmax — voiced strong opposition to the new policy, issuing a statement that it was ” without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections” and “would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues.”

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump was asked about the new Pentagon press policy and he not only said he supported it, but threatened to revoke the press corps’ access to the White House as well.

Keane, who is now a Fox News senior strategic analyst, spoke to Baier about this controversy on Tuesday’s episode of Special Report with Bret Baier.

The new policy was opposed by many networks and newspapers, Baier noted, including Fox News, CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News and others, and he played a clip from earlier in the day of Hegseth speaking about the policy at the White House.

Baier pushed back on some of the claims Hegseth had made about the Pentagon press corps, mentioning that he himself had covered the Pentagon for over six years, including when Keane was there.

“We knew not to — you don’t walk into the tank and the classified areas are off-limits,” said Baier. “We obviously were always trying to get the story from different elements. And there was a freedom, but everybody had badges with them. At the White House, I never walked into the Oval Office or the Situation Room.”

The new restrictions, Baier continued, were “stipulations that essentially are changing the dynamic about how to get information and how they disseminate information.”

“Yes, I mean, it doesn’t seem like the whole story is being told to our viewers here,” said Keane, and then offered a sharp criticism of Hegseth’s new policy:

What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story. That’s not journalism. Journalism is going out and finding the story and getting all the facts that support it.

And no one’s going to walk in and bang on a door of a four-star general or senior civilian policy leader in the Pentagon. I never had that, but I did have journalists chasing a story of something that was going on in the Army. And those things were legitimate.

And, if anything, what would frustrate us in times is, we didn’t beat you to it. And something bad is happening and we’re getting our act together to do it. And, sometimes, well, let’s wait a couple days before we talk about that, and you guys are on it.

And that’s journalism.

“And if there are leaks or there are situations, there are investigations many times that lead to that,” Baier said. “But in the day-to-day, for military families, for military, us being in the Pentagon is usually an asset.”

Keane agreed, saying that he had “never, ever seen” something like this, adding, “When I was a four-star general, I insisted that all our new brigadier generals get a class, a few days on what the role of the media is in an American democracy.”

New generals, Keane explained, “have all these incredible war fighting skill sets, but dealing with the media isn’t one of them,” so he “wanted them to practice and get interviews and how to deal with the realities of this.”

This “education” was “very important,” Keane said, and he wanted them to “welcome” the media and “don’t see the media as something to be intimidated by,” but instead “as your conduit to the American people.”

“And that’s how I always saw it and believed in supporting it,” he continued. “There were times when stories were done that make me flinch a little bit, yes, but that’s usually because we had done something that wasn’t as good as we should have done it.”

“Well, we’re all standing in solidarity, almost all of us,” Baier replied. “And we hope that changes. We will see where this policy goes.”

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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