✍️ Petition: Media Must Expose Hegseth's War on the Press

A CENTCOM public affairs official has confirmed the Pentagon maintains a secret blacklist of journalists. When an Intercept reporter pressed for details about the Iran war, the official threatened: "You'll be put on a list of people to disregard."

Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has evicted the New York Times and NPR from their long-held desks, replacing them with outlets like Breitbart and One America News. A federal court struck down his policy requiring journalists to pledge not to gather unauthorized information — so Hegseth simply shuttered the Pentagon pressroom and began conducting polygraph tests instead.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation was unambiguous: "None of it has anything to do with security, all of it has everything to do with censorship and intimidation." A secret blacklist of journalists at the world's most powerful military is not a bureaucratic quirk — it is a constitutional crisis.

We call on the media to cover Hegseth's Pentagon not as a poorly managed press shop, but as an institution waging deliberate, systematic war on the First Amendment. The public deserves to know which journalists are blacklisted, who put them there, and what the military is trying to hide.