The Pentagon is shaping the media landscape

Good morning, dear readers,

In the nine months of Donald Trump’s term in office, the media landscape in and around the White House has changed rapidly. Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt sees it more or less as her right to either react rudely or insult members of the press. Some long-established media outlets have their accreditation revoked, and some are not allowed to travel because they report negatively on Donald Trump. Now the Pentagon is also following suit – and is creating completely new facts.

The process in the US Department of Defense is not entirely new. Defense Minister Pete Hegseth – recently also named Minister of War – presented a 21-page media guideline a few weeks ago. According to this, journalists are no longer allowed to publish information without permission from the Pentagon and are no longer allowed to move freely around the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense. US President Donald Trump had previously defended the tightening of access rules. It worries him “that generals can walk around freely with journalists and make mistakes.” The major media companies missed the deadline for signing; in addition to the “New York Times”, “CNN” and “ABC”, Trump’s court broadcaster “Fox News” also left the Pentagon.

Hegseth has very little interest in that. On Wednesday evening (local time) he presented the new press corps, or rather: the new courtiers of the US government. 60 representatives of so-called “new media” are to report from the Pentagon in the future. “New media and independent journalists have developed a formula to bypass the lies of the mainstream media and bring real news directly to the American people,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell claimed at These should now become the new truth.

The Pentagon has not disclosed who is represented in the new press corps. However, the media that are known so far have things in common: they are right-wing conservatives and are very close to Donald Trump’s government.

The US Department of Defense gets what it wants: reporting that it can influence decisively – and also relies on bloggers and social media. Hardly any of the new media have a purely digital reach on your own website. “RedState” and “Gateway Pundit” only recorded 9.7 and 25.1 million homepage visits in August – “Fox News”, on the other hand, had almost 250 million and the “New York Times” over 600 million.

The major US media will continue to tap into their long-term sources in the Pentagon for exclusive stories, but access to them is becoming increasingly difficult. This is a victory for Donald Trump’s government because the hated “mainstream” media is left out while the government can spread its own narrative. Trump has been doing this for years on his own social network “Truth Social”, but now his government also has the power to do it.

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