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Pentagon public affairs officers were conspicuously absent from the Military Reporters and Editors conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month, one more manifestation of the historic breakup that culminated in the departure of every major news outlet from the Pentagon press room in October.

“When official voices retreat behind locked doors, when our inquiries are met with ignored emails, the democracy that we serve is weakened,” Jen Judson, a defense reporter for Bloomberg News and the president of MRE, told conference attendees. 

Things look different to some members of the Pentagon’s handpicked new press corps. “What I’ve seen so far, the Department of War has been forthcoming,” R.C. Maxwell, a reporter for RedState, a Salem Media–owned online outlet, told me. “They have a hotline, which you can immediately call, and someone will answer right now. I’ve dealt with the federal government for years. As the press secretary for Project Veritas, it was my responsibility to reach out to the government when we needed a comment on a story. Do you know how rare it was to actually receive an answer from an actual public affairs person? Are you aware that you can now actually call on the Pentagon [and] someone will answer?”

As it happens, many reporters are not aware.

“Folks are wandering around the bullpen, not near their phones, and nobody checks voicemail,” a wire service reporter and erstwhile Pentagon press corps member told me. “I’ve also had a situation when I called the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] duty officer, and apparently that phone rings to the secretaries that sit by the front door and deal with badges, access, and credentialing. So I’ve had conversations like, ‘Hey, I don’t know why you’re answering this. I have an urgent query. Can you put a military officer on the phone, please?’ That’s when I’ve also discovered that nobody knows how to transfer phone calls.” 

Even if you can get Pentagon officials on the phone, they are reluctant to talk, the reporter, who asked not to be named because they did not have their employer’s permission to speak to the press, said. “There is a growing sense that the phones may be, for lack of a better way, surveilled.”

While reporters can technically request day passes to access the building, that hasn’t worked well in practice, the same reporter told me. “I have tried to do this several times, and the effort has been unsuccessful. Each time, I’ve been asked to provide an hour-by-hour summary of what I’m going to be doing in the building and a full list of who I intend to speak with, formally and informally. From the perspective of journalism and reporting, that is a complete nonstarter. That’s never been the case before.” 

Former Pentagon badge holders have continued to publish significant national security stories, including scoops on survivors of US naval attacks in the Caribbean and efforts to send military attorneys to the Justice Department, but many say the work has changed. 

On the downside, they now spend considerably more time trying to set up outside meetings with people they used to see every day. “I don’t think they want to meet in the building anyway,” another former Pentagon reporter, who works for a military-focused publication, told me. “The culture is definitely like ‘It’s better to meet up off campus.’” 

On the upside, reporters have more time to engage with other sources. “The embassies of our close allies are far more open and willing to speak,” the wire service reporter said. 

The deep freeze between the Pentagon of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth and most of the US media began in February, when Hegseth “reshuffled” desk assignments in the press room, replacing the New York Times, NBC, NPR, and Politico with a raft of sympathetic outlets—Breitbart News, One America News Network (OANN), the New York Post—as well as the liberal HuffPost. 

In September, the Defense Department issued a memo requiring journalists to submit their reporting to the Pentagon Press Office (PPO) before publication. When media outlets broadly rejected it, the Pentagon changed the restrictions, threatening instead to revoke reporting badges for “soliciting” information from DoD officials. Nearly every member of the Pentagon press corps turned in their badge rather than sign on to the new rules. 

Only two of the hundred and ten previous members of the Pentagon Press Association accepted the guidelines: a correspondent for OANN and a freelancer from India, as Aaron Mehta, the editor in chief of Breaking Defense and a PPA board member, told the MRE conference. “That included all the right-leaning outlets. This is not a partisan issue at its core. This is about our ability to do our jobs.”

But a close reading of the Pentagon restrictions reveals a curious detail: even before the previously credentialed journalists left, officials were planning to grow the press corps, not winnow it. “The list of authorized areas is expected to be modified within the next three months, as DoW intends to upgrade the space used by PFAC holders to a different area that provides WiFi access and cell phone service, as well as increased space for the expanded press corps,” the memo says.

“New media outlets and independent journalists have created the formula to circumvent the lies of the mainstream media and get real news directly to the American people,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X last month, announcing that more than sixty new people had been given access to the building. “Their reach and impact collectively are far more effective and balanced than the self-righteous media who chose to self-deport from the Pentagon.”

Among the outlets that recently obtained Pentagon press badges were MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV and far-right news site the Gateway Pundit, both of which were sued for defamation in relation to claims of fraud or “rigging” in the aftermath of the 2020 election. (LindellTV was found liable while TGP settled.) MAGA podcaster Tim Pool’s Timcast News is there too, but Pool has said he’ll only use the access for “general inquiries and interviews,” as his outlet doesn’t do investigative work. Last year, a federal investigation found that a Russian government-funded company had paid Pool, among others, to produce videos. 

The new press corps also includes Laura Loomer, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who refers to herself as “President Trump’s chief loyalty enforcer,” and Wade Searle, a reporter for the Christian conservative LifeSite, who was accused of ties to white supremacist Nick Fuentes when he worked for Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar.

Maxwell, the RedState reporter, told me that his outlet will offer “fresh reporting and angles on international and geopolitical matters.” Americans, he said, “want the truth and they want the facts. And unfortunately, when everything is from one particular slant, it’s harder to generally see the truths and the facts. This is an opportunity to enlighten more people in America on national defense matters. So it certainly is a little confusing to see the ‘sky is falling’ response from journalists, especially when the Pentagon has done nothing to change constitutional protections afforded to journalists.”

The Pentagon’s new reporting guidelines emphasize the consequences DoD officials could face for sharing information that has not been approved for release. I asked Maxwell what he would do if he received classified information of public interest. How would he balance the need to share it with his responsibility to protect his source?

“I’m trained under [Project Veritas founder] James O’Keefe in terms of my journalistic ethics, and O’Keefe believes that if you’re a journalist and you’re doing the right thing, you have to be willing to go to jail to protect the source,” Maxwell told me. “And that’s something, certainly, I believe in. Institutions smile down upon those journalists and those people exercising their First Amendment right. And again, there are protections that allow journalists to post and publish government secrets as long as they didn’t participate in the obtaining of those secrets.”

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