The press faces a Pentagon ‘black box’ on the Iran war

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — A version of this article first appeared in the Reliable Sources newsletter. You can sign up for free here.

Wednesday’s Pentagon press briefing by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine gave at least the appearance of transparency.

But the military leaders mostly received kid-glove treatment from the Trump-aligned media outlets that had front-row seats in the briefing room.

And more broadly, as Hegseth says the US is “accelerating” its strikes inside Iran, Pentagon beat reporters say they are not getting answers to key questions about the ongoing military operations. “Lots of chest-thumping, less concrete data” is how one reporter put it.

“The effect of the lack of information is that the war has become something of a black box,” another source said.

Militaries always maintain secrecy amid armed conflicts, and journalists always gather information from a variety of sources, which in 2026 means scouring commercial satellite imagery and dissecting eyewitness videos to better understand the battlefield.

But “in ordinary war times,” one of the Pentagon reporters said, “we would be getting briefings once or twice a day going into minute details about how the war was evolving.”

Instead, “these days, they put a random tweet or video out with details,” with no way for journalists to follow up, another said.

Six longtime US military reporters were granted anonymity for this assessment of the push-and-pull between the Pentagon and the press corps.

Several of the reporters noted a video released Tuesday night by Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command. Cooper shared several valuable details — “we’ve already struck nearly 2,000 targets with more than 2,000 munitions,” he said — in the video.

But gone are the days of background briefings with military officials who could get into those specifics — and field follow-up questions. “The Pentagon hasn’t allowed them to brief us yet,” one of the reporters said.

Or perhaps the White House is the chokepoint. Pentagon beat reporters frequently follow up with military representatives via phone and email. But “virtually everything gets referred to the White House,” including operational questions, another reporter said. As a result, “most of what we gather is through leaks and Signal messaging, off the books.”

Through those efforts, the public is getting a more balanced picture, beyond the bravado of Hegseth’s statements.

Two different briefings in one

On Wednesday, Hegseth made an incendiary, though unsurprising for him, charge: That the press prominently covers service member casualties to “make the president look bad.”

Hegseth has a long history of using the media as a foil, even when he was himself a member of the media, hosting shows on Fox News.

From his Pentagon podium, Hegseth alluded to the Iranian drone strike in Kuwait that killed six service members and said, “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step.”

Caine, on the other hand, began his remarks by expressing “profound sadness and gratitude” for the deaths in Kuwait. “There were almost two briefings going on,” one by Hegseth and the other by Caine, CNN’s John Berman said afterward.

Washington Post military affairs reporter Dan Lamothe tweeted about the importance of covering military casualties, including, yes, on the front page: The press has “highlighted sacrifices by American service members and their families, and shortcomings that sometimes allowed those deaths to happen,” Lamothe wrote. “We’ll continue to do so. It’s too important to stop.”

Press corps tensions resurface

The Pentagon’s two briefings since the start of the war, on Monday and Wednesday, have also caused a back-and-forth about who should be in the room.

Last fall, Hegseth credentialed a right-wing “press corps” after traditional news outlets rejected new press pass rules that media lawyers said criminalized routine reporting. Media analysts said Hegseth was trying to replace independent observers with obsequious pro-Trump voices.

Now, most military beat reporters work from outside the Pentagon’s five walls, though some were admitted inside for Wednesday’s briefing, including a reporter from CNN.

Hegseth only answered questions from his chosen outlets on Monday, and he criticized NBC when a reporter from the network tried to get a question in anyway.

On Wednesday, he appeared to call on just one traditional outlet, the BBC. Tom Bateman, the BBC correspondent, asked for an update on “the reported strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran on Saturday,” and Hegseth tersely said, “We’re investigating.”

Many of the questions from the other, more opinionated media outlets were weighty and worthwhile.

Still, Hegseth’s stacking of the deck with Trump-aligned outlets was met with ridicule in some quarters, especially since Pentagon press access has been severely limited, even for Hegseth’s favored figures.

A deeper issue, some reporters say, is what’s lost when journalists are largely kept away.

“Most of the press corps is not allowed in the Pentagon itself, where these very decisions are being made,” The Atlantic’s Nancy Youssef said Wednesday on a livestream panel. “In a war where the implications are so big, and people are having such a hard time understanding it, I do think that lack of information not only makes it harder for us to do our job, but I think it makes it harder for the American public to understand what’s happening.”

The briefing gap

Lamothe noted on X that until the Iran war began, the Pentagon had not held a press briefing since December 2 of last year.

There has been lots of one-way communication, however, with regular web videos and social media posts from the Pentagon’s press office.

Chris Meagher, the chief Pentagon spokesman during the second half of Joe Biden’s term as president, told CNN that his office routinely briefed the press corps twice a week from the podium and once a week off camera.

“I’m not saying we always got it right — there were times when we definitely didn’t — but there was always a good faith effort from the Public Affairs team and from the secretary’s front office to provide the public with information about what we were doing,” Meagher said. “There doesn’t seem to be that from this secretary or his political appointees.”

Meagher said there should be transparency about the military’s operations, while factoring in national security implications.

“Nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer money flows into the department,” he said, “and decisions being made by the secretary are literally life and death decisions about putting American troops in harm’s way — the public deserves to know what their military is doing, especially in times of war.”

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