Consider the power of this statement then: if they were ok with all of those things and now they draw a line that means that things have gotten much, much worse than they were before.

Well... maybe. If a company brings in new anti-sexual-assault training and a bunch of people quit around the same time that doesn't necessarily suggest the problem is the outrageous training.

I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.

This comment seems highly confused.

If you want me to try explaining something more clearly you should include a rough outline of what you think I said. Otherwise I've basically got nothing to do but repeat myself. Hopefully this helps.

The journalists and the generals can presumably still talk to each other over drinks after work. The journalists were only ever going to be tolerated in the building because US leadership thinks they are helping them achieve military propaganda aims which are rarely noble things. There isn't much at stake here beyond classified information.

US classified information has been a bit of a disaster for them. It just means the government is slowly escaping accountability for what it does. They have that massive spying program on US citizens and the last I heard of the story was they can't sue anyone over it because the courts aren't allowed to believe it exists.

This isn't about security at all. This is about control of the narrative. Hegseth and co would like you to believe it is about security. But there is absolutely no indication that there was an urgent issue that needs resolution.

The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative. We're moving from a state where the government was trying to control the narrative to the same state.

That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.

> The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative.

At that point you can just claim everyone working in the government is doing the same, or given the fact that they are working for the government it’s even worse since they’re employed full time (or were) to advance the government’s agenda!

Except that the government’s agenda is by and large the agenda of the people that it represents.

Not only is the point of view you’re expressing uselessly cynical, you’re depriving others of agency as well. It’s still a free country - press access doesn’t mean “government mouthpiece”. There are lots of news organizations and journalists with differing levels of professional standing and points of view and you can read all about them for yourself.

> Except that the government’s agenda is by and large the agenda of the people that it represents.

In this case the government's agenda is that these journalists should either get Hegseth to stamp their articles or pack their cardboard boxes and get out of the building. Make of that what you will.

Sure, but if I'm going off the OP who said:

> The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative.

Them packing their boxes would imply that the US government doesn't want control of the narrative?

The deal is the journalists (propagandists) get to be in the building if they're compliant with whatever narrative the US government wants to be spread. The US government is changing the narrative they want to target, implementing that policy with some administrative changes and some of the journalists aren't compliant with it any more. They now have to leave the building and sit in a different building. It is quite challenging to tag whether this development is good or bad in the big picture. The basic deal on offer to the journalists hasn't changed - the ones in the building are compliant, the ones out of the building may or may not be compliant with what the US administration wants said.

There's arguments that no journalists should be in the building, there's an argument that more eyes are always better and it is easier to keep track of these people if they are in the building.

Access is what allows them to form the relationships and contacts that let them report information that counters the propaganda. It is a two way street. The NPR reporter you mentioned, Tom Bowman, is not OANN and has reported many times very critically of the military.

Without giving any indication of the issues you found, your comment is entirely unhelpful and unproductive.

Roenxi implied that the real perpetrators/bad people are the journalists that left. And that they left because the government started to prosecute their crimes.

Does that really need an in-depth analysis to point out how dumb that idea is?

The idea that these journalists suddenly found a spine is also dumb [0]. It was an example about as far on the other end of the spectrum from what jacquesm said as I could think of; obviously it is dumb too. It's an extreme example. That doesn't make it confused though, and this is the thing about explaining what you read. If you comment about what you think got said directly it is easier for people to clear up misunderstandings.

[0] If they're sitting in the same office as the US military, they're propagandists. Their job is to spread propaganda. They aren't going to suddenly catch a case of principles now. This is the class of people that keeps cheer-leading every disastrous military expedition the US goes on.

> If they're sitting in the same office as the US military, they're propagandists.

You package that as a statement of fact, but it is just your opinion.

> Their job is to spread propaganda.

Then why are they not paid by the government?

> They aren't going to suddenly catch a case of principles now.

Indeed, you could reasonably assume that they had a case of principles all along and that this violates those principles.

> This is the class of people that keeps cheer-leading every disastrous military expedition the US goes on.

Except... they don't. That's why they walked out, because they want to be free to write whatever they want to write.

You are just parroting the usual 'luegenpresse' shit.

It is a safe starting point that my comments are my opinion. If I'm presenting a fact or someone else's opinion I usually hyperlink it with square brackets.

> Then why are they not paid by the government?

They're not government propagandists. They're more an outcrop of the military-industrial complex propaganda and generally associated with the neocons from what I've seen. From the outside this looks like it might be a turf war between the Trumpists and the Neocons, but it is hard to be sure.

> You are just parroting the usual 'luegenpresse' shit.

If they put more effort into intellectually honest reporting of what the US military is doing it'd be harder to make the epithet stick. Always an option; a bunch of journalists do actually manage it. Just not so many of the ones literally sitting with the military. Someone like Snowden may well have walked past a lot of journalists at his day job, but I don't think any of them were leaking the large and credibly illegal government spying program.

"In depth analysis?" No, but if you're calling someone confused it's probably basic decency--not to mention in keeping with the spirit of the site guidelines--to briefly state why.

Yes! There is no character limit here. It drives me bonkers when I read comments like that one. What is anyone supposed to get out of it? It has the same meaning as "lol".

Comments like that are why I left reddit - they do not foster discussion, they are low-effort attempts at getting updoots. If the only meaning that can be extracted from a comment is "I disagree", it shouldn't be a comment, it should be a downvote. It's a waste of an indentation level.

Comments like this are snarky, shallowly dismissive, and do little to add to a discussion all of which are against HN guidelines.

On the contrary, it is perfectly on point, the poster in fact admits further down below that it was a stupid comment. It is so confused that I can't make heads or tails of it but after some more back-and-forth (which if you had read the thread you would have known, rather than put in your uselesswords here) it became more clear: they really don't understand the comment did not make any sense.

Comments like these ruin the comments sections. I with there was an "original thought" button that just showed root comments.

> Comments like these ruin the comments sections.

Unlike yours, which are off topic and do not contribute at all.

> I with there was an "original thought" button that just showed root comments.

I think you meant 'wish', there is a little - mark at the beginning of each comment thread, if you click that the comments will collapse, there is also a 'start with collapsed comments' setting that only appears above 200K karma.

> would probably have an easier time securing

Hold up, that's starting to conflate two very different ideas of what's going on:

1. "We cannot tolerate any outside visitors because it could possibly give them an opportunity to commit espionage and other serious federal crimes.

2. "We cannot tolerate specific vetted reporters that haven't promised us control over what they write and how they write it."

We can tell this isn't a (#1) concern over actual security. If it were, this (#2) "deal" would never be offered at all.

This is about controlling messages and opinions, rather than securing specific facts.

This clearly has nothing to do with security, but do you really believe journalists are just "wandering" around the Pentagon and getting into classified materials?

According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon. What materials they are getting, I don't know.

> According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon

Source?

I was wrong. My source was Major Garret of CBS News. I was reminded of this as he is, as I type this, on KMOX Radio in St Louis discussing this very subject. You can probably listen to it online now and later, too.

The news outlets, by and large, are not upset at the idea they need to keep to more restrictive areas (though they've already had their access limited by this administration).

The concern is the "you can't report on anything we don't want you to" rule.

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.

The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?

If that's the case, shouldn't we also ban the top brass from restaurants, bars, churches and golf courses lest they encounter strangers there?

You made the counter argument, there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personal outside of a building the handles secret documents.

I'm surprised they were let in the building in the first place. Should I be allowed to go if I have a press pass?

> there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personnel outside of a building the handles secret documents

Under the new rules this would not have been allowed, either, unless the information was pre-approved messaging.

Why bother? It hasn't caused a major problem so far. This isn't new, it is how the world has worked for all of military history.

I know classified US secrets, the leaks around the Snowden era were pretty interesting. Guarantee you the people in the building know more than me. The NOFORN stuff actually tends to be the spiciest if you feel an urge to go look at something.

> This isn't new

Strike packages being leaked before launch? Yes. Yes, that’s new. We spent a lot of time and money to get that access in WWII. It was what Turing built the Enigma to do.

> The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?

I can think of one. Name ends on Hegseth.

And that same lying press and propaganda club that roenxi is arguing against here reported his gaffe pretty accurately, which if they had been who he claims they are they never would have.

National security has been the excuse of damn near every uncharacteristically authoritarian move our government has made, and the pentagon has unprecedented means to securely discuss and transfer information. The onus of controlling that information has always fallen on people with clearance, and the biggest sensitive information compromises in the past couple decades were perpetrated by national political figures. There are people a lot snoopier than reporters looking for information a lot more sensitive than they are who’ll leak it to foreign governments without us ever knowing — that’s who they really have to worry about. Controlling media is, and has always been about protecting themselves from embarrassment.

there are separate issues

* whether you need to limit people learning something

* whether you need to limit people publishing something

"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.

1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.

You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.

Or that they draw the line when it's about little hummiliations done to themselves, and not to lying and misreporting

You see what you want to see.

You're making the conclusions you want to see without anything to back them up.

There are countless reasons why they are acting now when they haven't before and most of them do not support what you are implying.

Journalists have a long and storied history of standing up for free and independent journalism, and they're right to!. However, they have a rather more spotty record (with highs and lows) of standing up for other fundamental requirements for a well-functioning liberal democracy.

So one possible (admittedly uncharitable) take is that they were OK with all those other things because those things didn't hurt them, and might've helped them. They're not OK with this change not because it makes things worse, but because it makes things worse /for them/.

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

It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.

As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.

So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.

Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time. Which is why many, except for quatari al jazeera djihadis refused to go.

Same as with the tulkarem incident where the west bank police lynched two israelis on camera and the mob noticed the filming reporters and smashed the cameras.

Yeah ok, that's why foreign reporters had to shoot footage clandestinely from foreign aid airplanes:

https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/stain-on-humanity-journali...

Aand its repackaged al jazeera as evidence

Since your unsubstantiated comment did not reference the content of the sourced article in any way I can only conclude you're replying in bad faith and trolling.

For bystanders, some Israeli sources against this 3-day-old account's baseless claims:

- 2025 Jun 7 oped about why it's a good thing that Israel doesn't allow journalists into Gaza (https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/409591)

- 2025 Jul 9 article "Israel Blocks All Foreign Journalists From Gaza, High Court Delays Ruling on Appeal for Access" (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-09/ty-article/.p...)

>Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time.

Israel has killed dozens of journalists, officially marked as press, in targeted killings.

It's pretty hard to take someone who is pointing at journalists embedded in combat units as examples of a deficit of backbone in that industry seriously.