There’s controlling the narrative and then there’s whatever it is that the Pentagon is doing.
In case you haven’t been paying very close attention, it has been a wild couple of weeks in both traditional and social media narrative-land since the Department of Defense announced a sweeping new set of requirements for the Pentagon press corps. Threats would probably nearer the mark than requirements. Basically, the new policy is that you can’t ask for info except from the official Pentagon source, and if you even try, they will prosecute you.
Now, ordinarily new organizations would rely on some protection from New York Times vs. United States, a 1970s-era Supreme Court Ruling that considers reporting on legally obtained classified information an act protected by the First Amendment. In this case, however, the DoD has attempted an end-around against that ruling in which they effectively ask the journalists to pre-agree that any disclosure of information not approved by the full chain of command constitutes harm to national security. So basically everyone except Mike Lindell’s personal blogger, OANN, Epoch Times, Info Wars, some right-wing influencers, and like half a dozen Turkish journalists refused to sign and turned in their credentials.
Of course, DoD wants to frame the rule as a common-sense attempt to keep a lid on loose lips. It doesn’t serve the public interest to have some blogger for Politico running his mouth about an active operation, or to have the New York Times publishing detailed specifications for the electronic countermeasures package on a prototype strategic bomber. Duh. But it’s not as if press members were permitted to just waltz into sensitive compartmentalized information facilities or classified areas. There are millions of Americans with security clearances and at least a million with top-secret clearances, so the idea that this kind of targeted policy is about limiting the dissemination of information that might endanger national security interests or routinely reveal top-secret information about U.S. military assets is absurd. So what’s it about?
· It's about centralizing complete control over every aspect of the narrative presented to Americans about the actions and state of the United States military.
· It’s about doing it in a way that lets the Pentagon maintain plausible deniability about claims of authoritarianism (“they didn’t have to sign - they just had to agree that ever asking anyone a question in any way might constitute a prosecutable offense”).
· It’s about weaponizing a classic form of narrative control (“You don’t want national security to be compromised…do you?”) that will play reasonably well with people who only hear about it casually.
· It’s about capitalizing on years of distrust in media that has been well-earned by hilariously left-wing and progressive newsrooms and even better cultivated by administration officials keen to use every opportunity to refer to the news media as “enemies of the people” and “the enemy within.”
This script will become familiar, I fear, no matter which party is in control: make it seem Democratic, like nothing was explicitly forced on anyone, make it seem like Common Sense, and link it to a very real issue (e.g. media bias) with a lot of symbolic power, and you can get away with just about any degree of authoritarian policy.
