Hegseth’s War on War Coverage
His claim that reporting on our war dead attacks Trump is sobering
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent his confirmation hearings promising senators he’d stop drinking. Based on his news conference Wednesday, that might not be such a great idea.
Reporting on dead American soldiers, he suggested, is becoming the “narrative.” The public, he said, should “cut through the noise” and focus on the mission.
The “noise,” in this case, is six American lives.
On Sunday, an Iranian drone struck a U.S. facility in Kuwait. The victims were Army reservists assigned to a logistics command. Their names: Sgt. Declan Coady, 20; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39; Capt. Cody Khork, 35; Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42; Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, 45; and CW3 Robert Marzan, 54.
Hegseth’s complaint was that their deaths were dominating the coverage of the war. When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins read Hegseth’s words back to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during Wednesday’s briefing, she didn’t flinch.
“The press does only want to make the president look bad,” she said. “That’s a fact.”
To this administration, a dead sergeant from West Des Moines is not a tragedy. He’s a political liability. News reporting on his demise is evidence of bias.
Consider the source. According to a sworn affidavit submitted to the Senate under penalty of perjury by a former sister-in-law, Hegseth once had to be carried out of a Minneapolis strip club by his own brother—drunk, in uniform, during a National Guard drill weekend. Wearing a uniform while intoxicated is a violation of military law.
NBC News also reported that 10 current and former Fox News colleagues said they had to “babysit” Hegseth before appearances because he smelled of alcohol. And a whistleblower complaint from his tenure at the veterans nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America described multiple occasions when he had to be removed from events after drinking to incapacitation.
It is some new pinnacle of irony that a man who required his own ‘babysitters’ at Fox News is now lecturing the press on professional conduct and what is worthy of the front page. It would be more defensible had his diatribe been attributable to an altered state.
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But this is a very recent discovery. Travel back to January 2024. Three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack in Jordan while Joe Biden was president. Republicans didn’t tell reporters to ignore the story. They blasted it across every microphone they could find. Donald Trump called the deaths “the consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness.” Sen. Tom Cotton demanded “devastating retaliation.” No one complained the coverage was unfair to the commander in chief.
Go back to August 2021. After the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Republicans spent years invoking those 13 deaths. They held hearings. They issued subpoenas. They put Gold Star families on stage at the Republican National Convention. Sen. Lindsey Graham said the loss of life was grounds for impeachment.
The political rule seemed simple:
When American troops die, the president must answer for it. That rule apparently changed on Inauguration Day.
Donald Trump launched a war with Iran that already has American casualties and, by his own admission, will produce more. “Sadly, there will likely be more, before it ends,” Trump said Sunday. “That’s the way it is.”
For the White House, that may be a strategic reality. For the family of Nicole Amor—a Minnesota mother of two who was days away from returning home—it is not simply “the way it is.” It is the destruction of their world.
The American press has reported every U.S. combat death for decades, under Republicans and Democrats alike. Those stories are not a partisan narrative. They are the public record of war.
The six names this week are Declan, Nicole, Cody, Noah, Jeffrey and Robert. Reporting them is not an attempt to make a president look bad, no matter how much Trump’s shameless sycophants whine.
It’s journalism.
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Hegseth has no right being where he is. I appreciate the effort you make showing this.