>>there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions

That's not exactly what's happening.

>>The rules limit where reporters can go without an official escort and convey “an unprecedented message of intimidation” for anyone in the Defense Department who might want to speak to a reporter without the approval of Hegseth’s team

Game theory applies here. There will always be one journalist without any moral qualms that’ll stay, betting on everyone else leaving, and making a scoop.

Well, the White House press corps has already been changed to (how do I write this in a way that won't get me downvoted?) include more reporters friendly to the current administration since the White House asserted the right to determine itself who gets access (formerly it was the White House Correspondents' Association), so the chances of such a more-or-less unified boycott are slim. And I don't have any doubts that the Pentagon will also quickly find enough "warm bodies" (besides those from OANN) to prevent an embarrassing almost empty room at the next press conference...

They should all ask the hard questions. If they're going to not have access either way, why not take the way that also exposes the corruption?

>First sign of a profession having a backbone in months

They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.

Now they suddenly grew a "backbone"?

They just see the signs of lack of long term legitimacy for this particular government and play pretend at safe courage.

This might be what we need. SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised. Giving him less earned media may be a win.

They'll get exclusive interviews, they'll get to be visible on TV asking questions to important people, they'll get invited on trips where they can film in front of a cool background like a military base or something.

I think it's worth it for anyone that cares about the aesthetics of journalism more than actually reporting anything of value.

They get to publishing official "leaks", official stories that get published earlier than what other journalist get and often with the ability to ask additional questions that allow the story to be tailored towards their readers.

> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?

Imagine being an aspiring blogger/independent journalist. One can only dream of such a possibility as to join the press corp of Pentagon. Of course many will agree to all restrictions and rules for the opportunity.

That's not true. It's an agreement not to publish classified information that has been leaked to the media.

Nothing stops them from publishing criticisms of the administrations talking points, or conversations that happen outside of press conferences.

> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?

The ones who stay are influencers. Not journalists. Their viewers (almost certainly not readers) don’t know the difference.

Hey I embrace remote working too, but not everyone views it that way

> can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff

Obviously this rule would apply only to real journalists. Members of the party will get free roam. They will stay.

Just another day in the life of a regime.

They couldn’t do anything else. The power grab happens even when they would have succumbed. At least they quit with a spine.

If they don’t go back in a week, which can be seen from several examples, like Hungary, that it doesn’t work. I think compared to the Hungarian government, this was a misstep of Trump (which I hope they make it more). In Hungary, when something like this happened, you always lost when you didn’t succumb to authoritarianism. You lost your previous privileges no matter what, but you lost more if you protested. They tried to keep up a facade that nothing changed, while everything changed. In this case it seems to me as an outside observer, that nothing value was lost by quitting compared to signing up.

Or Trump and co don’t want to keep a facade at all. But then they need to bet on that most people in America are really fascists.

It has worked in the UK. The then government had decided to unilaterally exclude some "hostile" media from the room and all the others walked out in protest.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/03/political-j...

Not sure if it this was ever tried before by any US government entity - but, if the condition for remaining an accredited Pentagon reporter is only reporting the official statements of the Pentagon (which you can also copy from their press releases), then having the accreditation seems largely pointless to me?

Why would they resign? Their beef is with the government, not their employers

I used to watch Donald Rumsfeld daily giving his briefing… the hardest questions asked to him by the beacons of democracy in the press corps was “how are you”.

Well every step they do seems to be copy/pasted from North Korea.

Since nobody is protesting now you can expect that 5 years from now the regime will start making disappear people vaguely opposing the gov decisions or being suicided on a regular basis.

The government gets that even if journalists agree.

> Less press

War journalists will keep reporting. This just means the government’s position doesn’t get a say every time.

> How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?

HN and the broader tech community have had their mask off moments.

> people will have enough

Likely at least a third of Americans do actively support the current administration and their decisions, so "having enough" is out of the question.

”Let’s not talk politics, it’s just inflammatory. Hey, cool LLM model. Shiny!”

49.8% of the population voted for Trump, myself among them. First time voting Republican.

Everything I've seen so far from Trump is what I voted for. And almost everything Democrats have said and done has reaffirmed my choice.

Every one I've spoken to that has been surprised Trump was elected lives in a bubble. Hacker News is one such bubble.

You're not going to get any reliable "when are the masses going to revolt" info here.

Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?

Leaks and whistleblowers do not form in a vacuum. Less press means less oversight, fewer connections built, fewer threads pulled.

And even so, not all Pentagon business is all “life-and-death-top-secret”. Censorious governments LOVE the “national security” excuse.

Free Press is part of checks and balances. If you are going to rely on leaks for this stuff to come out, you are going to have a bad time.

https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-...

"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."

Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.

They’ve started bombing fishermen, you tell me why they want one. It’s not in good faith.

What is the point of being a Journalist (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "write", word for word, the article they give you to publish?

I think people are being slightly hyperbolic. It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon. In general I think this is a good thing but not because I think it's a good idea. Rather, I think that the government, regardless of who happens to be in power, and the press should have an adversarial relationship, but the deep intertwining of the government and the press undermines this, even without corruption. You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.

I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.

There can always be good-faith justifications.

There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.

It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.

There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.

It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.

The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.

And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.

They want to use the journalists to spread their propaganda rather than have them uncover inconvenient facts.

With the blatant disregard for any rules and decorum, and a proven self-serving track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.

You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.

Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.

This is a hyperbolic take. In countries with military censors, articles are submitted, from the newspaper's offices, to the censor's office for approval before publication. Nothing under this arrangement stops an American colonel from walking into the NYT's offices, dropping a folder at reception, and persuading the NYT to publish the contents of that folder. While it does prevent investigative journalism in the military, which is despicable on its own merits, the fact that it turns newspapers solely into PR outlets is neither new (i.e. as a general phenomenon in American media) nor limited to only the officially sanctioned point of view.

This is no different than pretty much any company. Do you think Apple lets reporters wander throughout their campus looking for new hardware, and allow them to ask engineers information about what they are working on? No. Apple does not let them wander around, and they advise all of their employees to never talk to press.

This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII, often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative. Both points were repopularised in the US around 2016 or so by Richard Spencer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer). For some reason both are now entering more mainstream usage among the right.

> “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” 1984

It's always fun to compare Trump quotes against other presidential quotes.

Jefferson: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Reagan: "There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our 'noble experiment' in self-government"

FDR: "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."

Trump: "The press is the enemy of the people."

> what kind of world are they living in?

It’s projection, as usual.

Trust in the media is at an all time low [0]. You might be the one living in a crazy world where you trust everything the press says.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx

This is what Trump has been saying for years. What exactly surprises you in this?

Fact check: True. You may prefer the dishonest press over world peace, but that does not make the claim wrong.

We are currently clean on triple sec

What's next? Asking hard questions, or follow up questions?

If Trump says "I've ended 7 or 8 wars" or says "I've lowered drug prices 800, 900, 1000 percent" and no one says

"Sir, how is it possible to lower a price by 900 percent" or "Could you specify which conflicts it is you refer to by those 7 or 8 wars?" then you aren't a journalist.

If you go to an event where such things are said and there is no opportunity to ask these obvious follow up questions, then you stop going there, or you aren't a journalist.

If someone asks these questions and that leaves them excluded from those events - then you also stop going there in solidarity, or you aren't a journalist.

> this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court

Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. It’s not appropriate for great powers, whether that be America or China.

We need to deal with this domestically. With our own laws. In our own courts.

> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none

Ah, got it.

That's not what the song is about. Its about mental illness. Pink was shutting out the world, one brick at a time.

> With an access badge, at least you can leak something important anonymously

You think generals leak to journalists at press conferences?

Because it's interesting. We don't need to censor everything.