October 16, 2025
Secretary Pete Hegseth
The Department of War and Censorship Defense
Mr. Secretary:
In support of the journalists who gave up their press credentials rather than follow your undemocratic rules for covering the Pentagon, I am officially returning my pass. I know it expired long ago: in fact, it’s more out of date than Andrew Cuomo. Worse, the highly-regarded news organization I reported for has been silenced, at least for now. But if I were still a working hack, I’d join my colleagues (including Fox, your old shop) in refusing to sign the pledge.
As every news outlet worth its salt has made blindingly clear, these restrictions are an unacceptable, probably unconstitutional attempt to muzzle the press. The recent memo says, “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” and reporters who don’t comply could be branded “a security or safety risk.”
This would leave journalists with roughly the same function as transcription software (and with a budget in the $850 billion range, you can afford that already). The right to know is never more crucial than when our troops—sons and daughters, neighbors, and loved ones—are in combat.
The correspondents who risk their own lives to bring the truth to the people back home are not criminals. Yet under your diktat, even Matthew Brady could have been gagged for using the high-tech tool of his time, a camera, to report the grim reality of the Civil War.
I planned to send my badge back to DOD when I left the news business in the fall of 2001 but at the time, the Washington-area mail was paralyzed by the post-9/11 anthrax attacks. It’s been in my closet since along with other memorabilia, including photos taken when I covered official trips with two of your predecessors. They didn’t always like what we reported, but never in a million years would they have tried anything like this.
Amen brother!