Those Allegedly Untrustworthy American Reporters

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, January 05, 2025

 

Back in October, the U.S. Department of Defense — yes, I know what the administration calls it, but check the Federal Register or the most recently passed appropriations bill — instituted a new set of rules that stated that Pentagon correspondents who “solicit” “classified national security information” or “controlled classified information” may be considered a security risk.

 

Although there is no single statute that provides criminal penalties for all types of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, disclosing classified information is almost always treated as a crime. That is, unless a jury is likely to find you “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

 

But no one has ever lost a press credential or faced punishment simply for asking about a topic that involves classified information. The current administration wanted not merely to criminalize leaks but to establish a new set of rules where they could punish the reporter who asked for or about and published the leaked information.

 

Just about every news organization with a Pentagon correspondent declared that restriction unacceptable and turned in their press badges. Institutions that agreed to the new limits on the ability to talk to Pentagon officials included The Federalist, The Epoch Times, and the cable network One America News.

 

The ostensible justification for this drastic new restriction on reporter access to the building and talking to sources was, as the 21-page memo stated, “preventing leaks that damage operational security and national security.”

 

And yet, in this recent operation in Venezuela, two major U.S. media institutions (one of which I write a weekly column for) faced a choice and made their priorities clear.

 

The New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night — but held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering US troops, two people familiar with the communications between the administration and the news organizations said.

 

The decisions in the New York and Washington newsrooms to maintain official secrecy is in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions — even at a moment of unprecedented mutual hostility between the American president and a legacy media that continues to dominate national security reporting. And it offers a rare glimpse at a thread of contact and even cooperation over some of the highest-stakes American national security issues.

 

Many U.S. media institutions are interested in reporting news that the administration would not like them to report. But very few American media institutions are interested in reporting news that would get U.S. service members killed. I know a lot of people want to believe that reporters are just the worst human beings on the planet, a bunch of Richard Thornburgs who would gleefully report a juicy scoop, even if it meant getting someone killed.

 

Individuals of that poor character are few and far between. This doesn’t mean that zero reporters are willing to disclose information that could put lives at risk; this past weekend, Seth Harp posted a photo and the name and a short biography of the current commander of Delta Force on X.

 

Harp contends that Delta Force, the elite counterterrorism unit of the U.S. Army , is  “an organization filled with cokeheads and pervaded by drug trafficking” and contends that in the operation in Venezuela, “the only narcotics involved were the ones that they were on.”

 

Harp also contends that “Narco Rubio” — his term for the secretary of state — wants Nicolás Maduro and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum removed from power “so that allies of his like [Ecuadorian president] Daniel Noboa, [former Colombian president] Álvaro Uribe, [former president of Honduras, pardoned by president Trump] Juan Orlando Hernández, [El Salvadoran president] Nayib Bukele, and [Chilean president-elect] José Antonio Kast can control the entire cocaine trade.”

 

The overwhelming majority of Pentagon correspondents have the highest respect for the people they cover. They also believe that the American people deserve the fullest possible picture of what their country’s military is doing, short of risking someone’s life. The administration justified its restrictive policies by arguing that reporters represented an unacceptable risk to American national security, but when push came to shove, those two newspapers withheld the news until it was safer.

 

I would not hold my breath waiting for anyone in the administration to reconsider their thinking.