Pete Hegseth: You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick, and you plant fake stories in The Washington Post.

Micah Loewinger: At a time of war and instability, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth loves to lob shots at the messenger. From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Just at the moment when we need the Pentagon press corps most, they've been replaced with right-wing influencers.

Anna Merlan: They're pumped. Tim Pool said, "We're not investigative reporters," so just essentially signaling right from the start that they didn't intend to do investigative journalism.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, a documentary about Seymour Hersh, who's lurking in the Pentagon hallways during the Vietnam War, led to the scoop of a lifetime.

Seymour Hersh: Instead of going to lunch with my colleagues, I would go find the young officers. Eventually, army guys just started saying, "Well, it's murder incorporated there."

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger. Late last Friday, The New York Times scored a win in its lawsuit against the Pentagon.

News clip: A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration's restrictive Pentagon press access policy, which threatened journalists with being branded security risks if they seek information not authorized for public release.

Micah Loewinger: The Times had argued that the policy, which they claimed violated the First and Fifth Amendments, allowed the Defense Department to freeze out reporters or outlets whose coverage it didn't like.

News clip: The government disputed that characterization, calling the policy necessary for national security.

Micah Loewinger: Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon plans to appeal the ruling. They also appeared to borrow a tactic from Donald Trump's recent Kennedy Center debacle. When in doubt, throw them out.

News clip: A spokesman said yesterday, an area of the building known as "correspondents' corridor," which reporters have used for decades to cover the DOD, will close immediately.

Pete Hegseth: At a time of war, the Department of Defense is removing media offices from the Pentagon.

News clip: A spokesperson for The New York Times said the new policy does not comply with the judge's order, and the newspaper has filed a new motion this evening to compel the Defense Department to do so.

Micah Loewinger: In addition to the correspondents' corridor closing indefinitely, the department said reporters will be moved to an annex off-site. The location of the annex is yet to be determined. This Pentagon's fight with its dedicated press corps came to a head last fall when the new policies, later challenged by The Times and others, caused the majority of mainstream outlets to hand in their press passes and leave the building en masse. In December, I spoke to Dan Lamothe, who covers the US military and the Pentagon for The Washington Post to ask him about having to leave the building at the heart of his beat.

Dan Lamothe: It had a surreal feel. For me, it came in waves. Back in March, they revoked the specific desk that The Washington Post had, along with several other outlets. I cleaned out my desk way back then, but my last day was actually the day before you saw a lot of the other reporters walk out, ironically, because I was asked to go up to New York City for a press freedom dinner with some other Washington Post people. Yes, I had to turn in my badge, say my goodbyes. I took a photograph in front of the steps in the Department of Defense sign that was up at the time. Yes, I haven't been back in the Pentagon since October 14th, 15th.

Micah Loewinger: The rules around reporting there have been changing for a while. There were already areas of the building that you couldn't visit without an escort, right? I heard that maybe the McDonald's was off-limits.

Dan Lamothe: There have always been parts of the building that were off-limits. The hallways are common spaces, and then there are locks on many rooms in the building, and then there are places where we are openly welcome and invited. It would not be uncommon for me to walk 10 minutes to get to the Army because the building's that big, and drop in on Army public affairs, or walk across the hallway and go see the Joint Staff. There were places that had been welcoming and accepted spots that the media would go.

Over time this year, they had restricted those spaces basically down to the office space, specifically where the press sat, the adjacent office where the public affairs officers specifically for Hegseth's team sat, and the briefing room when it was actually unlocked, which was rare because they didn't really brief. You're restricted down to 5%, 10% of the building. As recently as a year ago, we probably had access to 70% of the footprint, something like that.

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think they had been shutting off your physical access to so many of these spaces?

Dan Lamothe: For a lot of years, we had people running the Pentagon from both parties who often had spent time around it previously. There's an expertise there. There's a lived experience there where you're like, "All right, I'm used to seeing a reporter around the corner when I'm in the hallway." I think this team came in with a different set of experiences. They had not been around the Pentagon nearly as much. They seemed to take exception right away to the idea that the media would be so co-located with them.

Micah Loewinger: During your time at the Pentagon, how often would you get a good story, a good scoop, a good lead from just walking around and talking to people? Did that access translate to good journalism?

Dan Lamothe: Being in the building was helpful for building relationships, which come in really handy on these contentious stories, by the way. When you actually know somebody and have talked about their kids playing Little League, and now you got to deal with a difficult story the following day, that helps, but rarely do you ever get pulled aside in a hallway and some big secret is spilled to you. There's times where they'll be like, "Hey, I might have something for you tomorrow." Just by virtue of being in the building, you're in the loop on things that they're already planning to roll out. It's way more of that than it is state secrets getting handed out in line at the McDonald's.

Micah Loewinger: Since you've all left the Pentagon, a crop of right-wing influencers have replaced you. The new so-called Pentagon press corps. Of course, these influencers signed that agreement from the Pentagon limiting their access to different parts of the building, limiting their ability to do certain kinds of reporting in exchange for access to press briefings. Give me a little bit more information about what exactly they've agreed to.

Dan Lamothe: The new restrictions that were presented to the traditional press corps came somewhat out of left field. There had been some thought that they might crack down again after the earlier restrictions on how freely you could walk in the unclassified spaces in the building. When it actually came to us, for me, the challenge was if you're asking me to sign upfront an agreement that says, "I will not solicit information," and not only classified information, but basically anything nebulously stated as defense information, that could be virtually anything. It could be arbitrarily applied. It struck me as problematic ethically and otherwise as a journalist.

Micah Loewinger: Basically, this said that if you solicited information from a Pentagon worker who was not authorized to speak, or information that was not authorized to be released, then you could lose access to the facilities.

Dan Lamothe: You could lose access. There was also vague language in there that felt pretty threatening to sources as well, which is to say if they spoke to you even about unclassified matters, let's say front office knife fights between the Hegseth team, there was a lot of that stuff this year as well, that could potentially get someone fired, prosecuted, disciplined.

The concern was at least there that they were going to go after people that were just trying to explain what's actually happening. I saw that as a concern, and I think the issue that wasn't lost on me as we looked at this. If you're going to tell me I can only get information that is coming through certain people authorized to speak, and then the people authorized to speak never brief, never answer a question with any kind of substance, where's that leave us?

Micah Loewinger: What's the point?

Dan Lamothe: With all that said, the job this year already had shifted a great deal. I spend more time on my phone in the evenings than I ever have because you're catching people when they're available. Tradecraft matters a great deal right now. I think you have to be careful with how you're speaking to people and protect your sources. You soldier on. You deal with the job as it is.

Micah Loewinger: Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Lamothe: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Dan Lamothe still covers the US military and the Department of Defense for The Washington Post, but no longer from his booth in the Pentagon.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, we meet the new Pentagon press corps. This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Perhaps the greatest irony about the Pentagon deciding to kick out its press corps and move them to a random annex in 2026 is that the current crop is a pretty friendly crowd.

After the mass exodus of the mainstream media, the Pentagon in October gave out press credentials to a group of about 70 people, including Laura Loomer, a far-right activist known to consort closely with the President; James O'Keefe, founder of the far-right sting operation Project Veritas; Matt Gaetz, the disgraced lawmaker and former attorney-general candidate accused of soliciting underage girls; Tim Pool, a far-right vlogger who inadvertently accepted Russian funding for his YouTube content; and outlets like Lindell TV, owned by the My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell, who lost a lawsuit brought by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems for defamation over the 2020 election; and Gateway Pundit, a far-right conspiracy outlet also being sued by that same former Dominion employee.

Anna Merlan covers extremism and conspiracy peddlers as a senior reporter at Mother Jones, so she's more than familiar with a lot of these names. When I spoke to her last December, she told me that just about everyone present in the Pentagon briefing room had happily agreed to the Defense Department's new policies.

Anna Merlan: They're pumped. When these new rules were first announced, people like Tim Pool, he essentially said, "We're not investigative reporters," so just essentially signaling right from the start that they didn't intend to do investigative journalism about the Pentagon or the Department of Defense. Others have said that these rules are reasonable and that the previous media and the building wouldn't agree to them just because they were biased against the President. It's what you would expect.

Micah Loewinger: The Pentagon's deputy press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, was the person who fielded questions from the new Pentagon corps. You reported on Wilson herself earlier this year, calling her an "overt internet troll with a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative [bleep] posting." What did you mean by that?

Anna Merlan: [chuckles] Yes, Wilson is an interesting figure. She's the daughter of Steve Cortes, a longtime Trump advisor. She was 26 years old when she took the job. She's had a lot of different roles in the MAGA internet ecosystem. She spent a lot of time tweeting, a lot of tweets excoriating immigrants and trans people, advocating for what she called "zero immigration and mass deportations," bemoaning the "death of the West," the term that is often used by far-right activists. She has also made even more wild and bigoted claims. For instance, repeating debunked lies about the lynching death of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched and murdered in 1915 by a mob in Georgia.

Micah Loewinger: She claimed that Frank was guilty for the murder that put him behind bars, something that most modern historians agree was a wrongful conviction. Just to sit on that for a moment, the fact that she's tweeted about this multiple times just raises for me the question, like, what waters is she swimming in that this is the stuff that occupies her attention?

Anna Merlan: It's pretty extraordinary. Claims specifically about Leo Frank are part of some of the deepest and most obscure pool of specifically anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They are absolutely rancid, and they've been used to justify violence against Jewish communities, which is specifically pretty extraordinary because the Trump administration has cast themselves as a friend to the Jewish people, has put a lot of energy into supposed investigations of anti-Semitism on college campuses. To install a press secretary in the Pentagon who had made these statements was in and of itself pretty wild. Then I and other news outlets, and even some elected officials called on the Pentagon to respond to these comments, and they never did. Nothing happened.

Micah Loewinger: In 2024, she tweeted, "The Great Replacement isn't a right-wing conspiracy theory. It's reality." She posted this over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the US-Hispanic population. Tell me about the question that Matt Gaetz, former member of Congress, asked in the briefing.

Anna Merlan: His question is a really good indication of what this new press corps means to do and his presence.

Matt Gaetz: Kingsley, if Nicolas Maduro leaves Venezuela today, what role will the Department of War have in a post-Maduro Venezuela?

Anna Merlan: It was a question about regime change positioned in a really supportive way.

Micah Loewinger: What sort of response did he get?

Anna Merlan: What was funny is he actually didn't get a particularly substantive response. Kingsley Wilson said, "The department has a contingency plan for everything. We are a planning organization." With all the access these folks have, and with all the ideological similarities they have to the people running the Pentagon right now, they're still actually not able to get substantive or newsworthy answers to some of these questions.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you about the question from Laura Loomer because it was quite interesting. She asked about the conflicting plans to, on one hand, cozy up to Qatar at the same time that the Trump administration is attempting to label the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization.

Laura Loomer: Now that the President has started the process of designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization, will the Department of War still proceed with selling F-15 fighter jets to Qatar, and how will they be able to train Qatari pilots at their air base in Idaho if Qatar is included in the designation?

Micah Loewinger: It's not a bad question, right?

Anna Merlan: Yes, no, specifically, Loomer's role is going to be the most interesting one in the new Pentagon press corps. Loomer is a very long-time anti-Muslim activist. She is extremely vocal about that, often in the most inflammatory of ways. She is well-known to be a pretty key presence unofficially in the White House. There is a verb, "loomered," which means someone getting thrown out of their job in the administration because Laura Loomer calls for it. This has happened several times, right? If there is any kind of oppositional force within the new Pentagon press corps, it might be her, but it's going to be her in the service of promoting conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim sentiments.

Micah Loewinger: All these outlets and personalities that now have credentials, these are people who have built brands over many years around conspiracy theories about shadowy government plots. It is tying my brain in knots watching these people, in exchange for access to press briefings, agree to not attempt to uncover government secrets. Isn't that their bread and butter that we're being lied to?

Anna Merlan: Yes, it is super interesting, especially for people who are part of what I would call the conspiracy media ecosystem. For years, they have set themselves up as adversarial to the US government, have suggested that there is a deep state within the government that is working against the American people, that might be depending on how far in the deep end of the pool they are, actively trying to kill all of us in various ways.

Here they are praising the Pentagon, praising the presidential administration, and, yes, agreeing to sign these rules that most reasonable people read and interpreted as agreements not to do investigative work. For me, there is a real question about how their audiences will respond. People who are distrustful of government, people who might be distrustful of politicians in general, how they're going to feel about these outsider media outlets agreeing to take on a really, really, really different role. I'm super curious if this works for them to maintain their audience.

Micah Loewinger: Anna, thank you so much.

Anna Merlan: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Anna Merlan is a senior reporter at Mother Jones, covering disinformation, tech, and extremism.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Cam Higby was one of the online personalities who received a press pass last November, representing his independent outlet, Fearless Media. He has over 760,000 followers on TikTok and over 430,000 on Instagram, where he posts videos of himself debating college students in the style of Charlie Kirk or, say, railing against immigration.

Cam Higby: I'm not talking about illegal immigration. I'm talking about all immigration. It's not racist to not want that. I don't care if you're coming from Europe. I don't care if your skin is whiter than mine. I don't care what you look like. We've got who we've got now. We're full. It's not racist, and I want that.

Micah Loewinger: Higby celebrated his new gig at the Pentagon by taking photos at a desk that he and others erroneously claimed had been occupied by The Washington Post. Higby posted, "Mainstream media is out, and new media is in." When I spoke to Higby last December, I asked him what he thought the job of the Pentagon press corps was all about and how he saw his new role.

Cam Higby: The primary role is to be the conduit between the United States government, the military portion of the government specifically, and the American people, also, of course, to push the government on hard issues, especially when they might be misstepping. What I don't think it is is to wander about the most classified building in the United States and harass every employee you see with the express purpose of extracting state secrets.

Micah Loewinger: Harassing employees? What are you referring to?

Cam Higby: I don't have specific names of people who are doing this. From what I understand, speaking to lots of people within the Pentagon, DOW employees, is that a very hostile work environment was created within the Pentagon by journalists who would walk about the building, camp outside of offices, harass people who leave their offices, burst their way into offices that they were outside of when somebody would open the door with their card, et cetera.

Micah Loewinger: I believe you're referring to something that Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said to you about a hostile work environment. Did you ask her for evidence that journalists created a hostile work environment in the Pentagon?

Cam Higby: Sure. She gave me one anecdotal example of them camping outside of her office and just perpetually ringing her bell to get answers about certain things. The question I asked Kingsley was actually specifically predicated on conversations that I had with a lot of different people at the Pentagon.

Micah Loewinger: I've never heard of some kind of chaos where journalists are hiding around every corner, pouncing on people.

Cam Higby: Well, of course, you haven't because the people that were inside the building before were the people doing it. Of course, you haven't heard about that. That's the main freedom, by the way, that's drawn back in the new agreement. You can't go into this part of the Pentagon without an escort. It's really just a freedom thing. It has nothing to do with information-sharing.

Micah Loewinger: The agreement clearly says that if reporters attempt to solicit classified information, they will be assessed for being a "security or safety risk." The agreement defines soliciting information as "direct communications" with DOD personnel or public advertisements or calls for tips encouraging DOW employees to share non-public DOW information. A lot of this sounds like very basic aspects of the news-gathering process.

Cam Higby: I explicitly asked the Pentagon about this. I was informed that these have always been the rules for the Pentagon press corps, that you are allowed to ask members of the DOW for information related to ongoing issues, but what you are not allowed to do is expressly badger non-authorized employees to give you information that is not public. There's a difference between information that is okay to be public, that the government is okay to give out information that isn't, because it can literally get people killed. We're journalists, not Chinese spies.

Micah Loewinger: That's a pretty absurd way of describing something that's very common in the American press, which is trying to give the American public a view of what their government is doing, even when the government doesn't want them to know about it. Is that not a fundamental part of investigative journalism?

Cam Higby: Well, it can be. It depends on what the information is. If the information is related specifically to some kind of attack on the American people, then sure. If it's, how do you know that these boats are smuggling drugs? How do you know that these are actually narco-terrorists on those boats? Why would the Pentagon ever give you that information? Because if they tell you that information, then the bad guys know the information, too, and they know how to evade the Pentagon.

Micah Loewinger: If we only report what the Pentagon press secretary is saying to you, or we only report news that has been fed to us by specially curated spokespeople, if we don't do the work of walking around the Pentagon trying to develop sources and trying to get a deeper understanding into what our government is doing with our tax dollars, then we have no way of calling out their lies.

Cam Higby: I didn't say that you should never publish non-public information. What I simply said is, A, the people within the Pentagon should know you're a journalist. They have to wear press badges. They didn't have to before. They wore DOW employee badges, which is completely different.

Micah Loewinger: Here's the thing, Cam. This is the line they use every single time there's any kind of classified information they don't want us to report. Should The New York Times have published the Pentagon Papers? That's what they said at the time.

Cam Higby: Are you dense? If you pass by and pretend as if there are not situations where you could publish classified information that can get people hurt or killed, that's not my problem. That's probably why you're not in the Pentagon.

Micah Loewinger: You know what this really seems like? It really seems like this administration is very, very frustrated with the large number of people who are leaking to the press.

Cam Higby: I actually don't think they're concerned about that at all. It's a signal gate thing. I don't think they're concerned about it at all. The double-tap thing, I don't think they're concerned about it at all. Actually, having spoken to people at the Pentagon, no, I don't think they're concerned about it at all. In reality, what it seems is like the mainstream media doing what they always do, making things up and trying to attack the Trump administration, which, by the way, they didn't care what the Biden admin was doing.

Micah Loewinger: That's not correct. The New York Times sued the State Department for records related to Hunter Biden and whether his name came up in emails.

Cam Higby: What, three years after it happened, and Twitter completely banned the story from the platform? Are you talking about that?

Micah Loewinger: Bloomberg routinely sued the Biden administration and previous administrations for records that they refused to give out.

Cam Higby: They're digging for scandals. That's what they want.

Micah Loewinger: Do you believe that a potential war crime for bombing survivors of a boat who are defenseless is a scandal? Is that salient information that has been kept secret for two months that journalists have every right to make the American public aware of?

Cam Higby: No, I think they're trying to make a scandal, just like they're trying to make a scandal out of the new Pentagon press corps by saying things like CNN said very blatantly the other night on air that every member of the new Pentagon press corps is required to have their stories approved by the Pentagon, which the agreement actually explicitly says the opposite, right? They are lying, just like they always have. They're gripping on for dear life as their boat sinks.

Micah Loewinger: You posted on X that unethical conditions are that I can't publish information that's classified, CUI, or in national security interest without permission.

Cam Higby: Yes, so I had been under a misunderstanding. Actually, I was brainwashed by the story that the mainstream media was publishing after-- I don't even remember if this was before or after my first day in the Pentagon, which was just really basic orientation stuff. Then I went to somebody at the Pentagon, and I was explicitly informed. This applies only to DOW employees and not to members of the press corps.

Micah Loewinger: You are a Pentagon correspondent, and you signed an agreement with the Pentagon, and you thought that you were not allowed to publish classified information?

Cam Higby: Have you ever been gaslit? When you read that it explicitly says that you don't have to seek approval for anything, and then there's a whole mainstream media firestorm where everyone is telling you that you're not allowed to do this, and you haven't had an opportunity because you haven't been in the Pentagon yet to ask people at the Pentagon, and you're trying to defend yourself being gaslit by the entire multi-billion-dollar mainstream media empire, I think it's fair to allow a little bit of grace there, don't you think?

Micah Loewinger: It sounds to me like you didn't read this thing very closely.

Cam Higby: I read it extremely closely, and I've posted excerpts from it. A lot of the people attacking me haven't read it. They actually were begging for me to release it despite the fact that it's been publicly available. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut until I spoke with the Pentagon, but it's a little hard not to defend yourself when you're receiving thousands of replies on your tweets and several mainstream media empires all closing in on you and attacking you.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs]

Cam Higby: You laugh at that, but it is the case, and you know it's the case.

Micah Loewinger: I understand that you've been under a lot of scrutiny recently. I'm not following.

Cam Higby: I think your audience is going to follow. I think this is going to look foolish for you.

Micah Loewinger: Here, let's talk about the press briefings. You spoke with the press secretary. What did you ask her?

Cam Higby: I asked about a French foreign military plot to assassinate Candace Owens, and that seems like a silly question. I understand that. The fact of the matter is that last night, Candace Owens had 147,000 people watching her live stream, where she was making these claims. A lot of American citizens are being brainwashed by claims that she's making. Obviously, Kingsley was not aware of any French assassination plot against Candace Owens. It seems that if there was one, being that it's such a high-profile issue that she would have been briefed on it, but she wasn't. Then, finally, I asked questions about the second strike from September.

Micah Loewinger: What do you say to listeners who have seen the partisan work that you do? You sometimes make appearances wearing a MAGA hat. You frequently, on your social media channels, defend the President and the administration. What do you say to people that feel like you can't be an honest broker, you're not going to ask hard questions in those press briefings?

Cam Higby: Well, if you think I haven't criticized the President or the administration, then you're just not familiar with my work at all. Also, the difference between me and the mainstream media is that, like you said, I don't claim to be unbiased, whereas they do. Every human being is biased, and every journalist is biased, including you. You're doing it right now. You obviously have a bias against me, and that's why you were laughing at me earlier.

Micah Loewinger: Sorry, I apologize for laughing at the Candace Owens thing.

Cam Higby: No, you don't have to apologize. It is funny, and I'm just pointing that out.

Micah Loewinger: Well, look--

Cam Higby: You weren't laughing with me. You were laughing at me, and that's fine. I don't care, and not offended, but you obviously have a bias. You're injecting it into your work as we speak.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, all journalists have biases, but are you going to hold the Trump administration accountable? Are you going to ask them hard questions?

Cam Higby: Yes, on issues that I think they should be held accountable for. Yes, and that's my bias, right? The difference between me and the mainstream media is that they think a second strike, which is standard military practice, has happened in every war. It's very obvious that they're just feeding this crap to people who have never seen military action before. Second strikes happen constantly and perpetually in all wars, regardless of who's president. Obama absolutely did it. Bush absolutely did it, okay?

Micah Loewinger: You're saying it's not illegal? According to who?

Cam Higby: Well, go ahead and cite me the law that says it's illegal.

Micah Loewinger: Multiple legal commentators--

Cam Higby: I'm going to be looking for Uniform Code of Military Justice. Go ahead and cite it. I don't care about other people's opinions, Micah. Those aren't relevant. We're talking about me and you right now. I don't care what legal analysts say. They're wrong all the time. Cite me the code. What is it, Micah?

Micah Loewinger: I don't know the name of the code, but you know full well that non-combatants who can't defend themselves are not supposed to be killed. That's what international law says. Am I wrong there?

Cam Higby: They are narco-terrorists who were transporting drugs that kill people into the United States. They were struck, and then they climbed back onto the boat. They are members of a foreign designated terrorist organization that transport materials into the United States that kill people. That's why we're fighting them.

Micah Loewinger: How do we know that they were transporting drugs?

Cam Higby: Again, I can't tell you that because it's classified, and I don't know.

Micah Loewinger: Isn't that really important? I think it is, actually.

Cam Higby: The government is not going to tell me how they identify terrorists because if I find that out and publish it, the terrorists are going to stop identifying themselves that way, making it impossible for the government to find them.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, Cam, I think we've both found this conversation quite frustrating. I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.

Cam Higby: I'm not frustrated. I'm having fun.

Micah Loewinger: I wish you the best of luck in your reporting in the Pentagon, and I hope that you're able to hold this administration to account, to scrutinize them, to seek sources outside of the narrow channel of spokespeople, that the Pentagon will push your way and that you're able to attempt to call out the government when they lie to you.

Cam Higby: Thank you. I assure you that that will be the case. If I feel I'm being lied to, I will absolutely seek the truth, as I have always done. I have a particular gripe with lies and falsehoods. You can call me partisan, whatever. I have a bias, obviously. I don't know if that makes me partisan, necessarily.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, Cam, I wish you the best.

Cam Higby: Appreciate it. Thank you, Micah. I wish you the best as well.

Micah Loewinger: Cam Higby is a Pentagon correspondent with Fearless Media. In the months since I interviewed him, there's little to no coverage of the Pentagon to be found on his social media channels. It's also unclear how often Higby or the other new members of the Pentagon press corps attend the briefings.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, a new documentary about a journalist who once loomed large in the halls of the Pentagon. This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. To round out this hour about reporting on the US military and the Department of Defense, we go back in time to the 1960s. It's the height of the Vietnam War. A young investigative journalist named Seymour Hersh starts attending Pentagon press briefings and finds them pretty damn silly.

Seymour Hersh: Around 10:30, they come and give you a little briefing. You file a little something off that. These guys get paid an awful lot of money for doing things like listening to the news conference and waiting an hour till the transcript's typed up and then writing a 500-word story off of it.

Micah Loewinger: What Hersh did instead was slip into the hallways of the Pentagon, and that's how he got the scoop of a lifetime.

Seymour Hersh: Instead of going to lunch with my colleagues, I would go find young officers. Talk a little football, and get to know them. I had been in the Army. I was in the Army Reserves. Eventually, army guys would start saying, "Well, it's murder incorporated there." [chuckles] I said, "What do you mean?"

Micah Loewinger: Hersh went on to become one of the most famous, complicated, and embattled reporters of the latter half of the 20th century, after exposing several government cover-ups, earning the begrudging admiration and ire of presidents and their top advisors.

President Richard Nixon: This fellow, Hersh, is a son of a bitch.

Micah Loewinger: President Nixon speaking in his White House tapes.

President Richard Nixon: Well, he's probably a communist agent. Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Poitras, an award-winning journalist and filmmaker whose documentaries include Citizenfour and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, together with her co-director Mark Obenhaus, filmed over 100 hours of interviews with Hersh for a Netflix documentary called Cover-Up, a film that was shortlisted for this year's Oscars. When I spoke to her last fall, I asked her why she wanted to make a film about Sy Hersh in 2025.

Laura Poitras: I first approached Sy in 2005, motivated by some similar concerns that I have today, which is the state of investigative journalism and the importance of investigative journalism to expose government wrongdoing and state power.

Micah Loewinger: One of the earlier scenes in the film is of a much younger Sy Hersh at a Pentagon press conference while he's employed at the Associated Press. During the lunch break, while all the other reporters are socializing, he slips into the hallway and chats up officers. One of them tells him, "We are in a stage of open murder in Vietnam." Another says, "Well, it's murder incorporated there." He says, "Murder incorporated, what?" Tell me what happens next.

Laura Poitras: He just gets a tip, and the tip is that there's someone being court-martialed. He doesn't know anything more, and then we start to put the pieces together. He learns then his name is Calley. He meets the lawyer. He tracks him down at Fort Benning and learns about this massacre that we now know as the My Lai massacre, where the US military went into a village of civilians and murdered over 500 people, including babies.

What obsessed Sy was, how is this possible? He didn't want to leave the story at just looking at the soldiers, but what was the chain of command? What he eventually uncovers is that there was a policy to bring body counts. Westmoreland, who was then running this war, needed dead bodies. They went and slaughtered this village. It took over a year for the story to break. A lot of people knew about this massacre, and then Sy got the tip.

Micah Loewinger: He wonders who else in the press might have known about this and sat on it.

Laura Poitras: Yes, he's convinced that many people knew.

Micah Loewinger: After he breaks the My Lai story, Hersh got a job at The New York Times, where he covered Watergate and the CIA's operation of spying on thousands of college students, domestic anti-war activists. Sy Hersh is a big reason that The New York Times even started reporting on the Watergate scandal. It seems like he had a great career there. Why did he decide to leave?

Laura Poitras: He's somebody who's always had some friction with his editors. He did this big investigative reporting on a corporation, Gulf and Western, which is a story he partnered with Jeff Gerth on, and they exposed a lot of corporate wrongdoing. His relationship with his editor shifted, that they became very nervous about the story that, all of a sudden, talking about corporate power and money didn't make The Times comfortable, and he got a lot of pushback.

Micah Loewinger: He said something in your film to the effect of, "The New York Times is a part of the corporate world, and it's not comfortable scrutinizing the corporate world."

Laura Poitras: Yes. In the course of the reporting, Jeff Gerth decided to look into the financial records of The Times and their corporate filings, and discovered that the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, had gotten a loan to buy an apartment at a discount, and he got it through the board. Then they had to confront their boss about this favorable loan because they were working on a story that was dealing with executives getting favorable loans.

It created a bit of a blowout. When we were editing, we had a big storyboard because we needed to see, have a visual, how do we hold all of Sy's stories in one place? We had this big board, and there was oftentimes, like, "Sy quits. Sy quits." Like, "Sy quits the AP. Sy quits The New York Times." Then at some point, it was like, "Sy quits the movie." It's a pattern.

Micah Loewinger: Another outlet that he worked at for some time and made an impact on was The New Yorker, which was home to his reporting into Abu Ghraib.

Laura Poitras: After 9/11, he wanted to understand, "How did this happen?"

Micah Loewinger: How did they not see 9/11 coming?

Laura Poitras: Yes. The more that we know, the more of a failure we know it to be, because the CIA knew the hijackers had entered the country and didn't inform the FBI, but then the lead-up to the Iraq War. I think that that just really set Sy off because he knew very well that there was no connection between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq. 9/11 was being used as a way to get through some policies that the Bush administration had been wanting to do for a long time, which was invade Iraq. They used this as an excuse to terrible consequences, and Sy gets this tip.

He talks to this general and first learns about Abu Ghraib, and he's being told about torture. Then he gets a second tip from somebody who was working for 60 Minutes who also is onto this story, and they have evidence of torture. 60 Minutes is getting pressure from the government not to publish their story. Sy runs with it. Through his reporting, he uncovers the Taguba Report, which was a general was assigned to look into Abu Ghraib and found that torture had happened. Yes, I broke this story, which redefined this war.

Micah Loewinger: Part of what helped redefine the war were the pictures that he helped publish in The New Yorker.

Laura Poitras: Yes, exactly.

Micah Loewinger: There's a remarkable story in your film about how he was able to solicit the source that gave him those pictures. Not to be too corny about it, but public media plays a role in this. [chuckles] Is that fair to say?

Laura Poitras: Yes, two whistleblowers of sources for this. The first one is Joseph Darby, who was in the unit and had access to the photos. After the first story broke, Sy goes onto Diane Rehm Show and says--

Seymour Hersh: Get in touch with me. 202-872-0703. Just call, leave a number, I'll get in touch with you.

Laura Poitras: He gets a call that afternoon, and a woman says, "You need to come see me." He goes and visits her, and she says, "I have this laptop that my daughter-in-law came back with Iraq, and it has photos." There was additional photos. The use of dogs to torture a prisoner. They're horrifying photos. This was somebody who was so terrified of coming forward and speaking to a journalist that she didn't even tell her closest family that she had talked to Sy. Until, actually, we started working on the film, she agreed to talk to us. When we were setting up cameras, she had to pull her husband aside and say, "This is why there's cameras here. In 2004, I talked to Sy Hersh."

Micah Loewinger: This is 20 years later?

Laura Poitras: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: She had kept this as a secret from her family?

Laura Poitras: She was scared about the repercussion, and she was right to be scared, because what we've learned is that the only people that are often held accountable for abuse of power are people who expose it. Joseph Darby was subjected to horrible retribution, and yet the people who created the framework for this system of torture are allowed to walk.

Micah Loewinger: You're speaking to the incredible risks taken, in some cases, by investigative reporters, but most of all, by their sources. Of course, the relationship between a reporter and his or her sources is one of the most sacred in journalism. You were able to get a remarkable amount of access to Sy Hersh's notebooks and files. These are yellow notepads we see over and over throughout your film. These are notes taken in the reporting process, in some cases, filled with names and numbers of people who, to this day, he has protected. He allowed you to have a deeply intimate look at his life and his professional career. How did you pull that off?

Laura Poitras: Again, he trusted us. He'd worked with Mark before, the co-director. He knew my work. Anything he shared with us, we were going to treat with utmost care in terms of source protection, and yet he was still nervous.

Micah Loewinger: He freaked out.

Laura Poitras: He freaked out.

Micah Loewinger: There's a moment where he sees a notepad that you're handling, and he says--

Seymour Hersh: What the [bleep] is this doing in your hands? This is an FBI guy, but most of them are CIA guys.

Mark Obenhaus: I don't think we're in a position at any point, or we're intending at any point to contact any of these people.

Seymour Hersh: Well, I'd like to quit.

Micah Loewinger: It sounds like this was not the only time that this happened. How did you bring him back?

Laura Poitras: I know what I'm doing in terms of source protection. He came back and trusted us. For me, it was very important to include it in the film because the stakes are real. It's the most sacred thing, the relationship between a journalist and their source.

Micah Loewinger: You clearly have a lot of respect for him and for his journalism over the years. That said, you did not shy away from a pattern of mistakes that he's made over the years.

Laura Poitras: It was important to me that we have to tackle size stories where he got it wrong. For me, it was really important to talk about Syria because I had friends who were tortured in Syria by Assad, and he knows very well that I have criticisms about that reporting.

Micah Loewinger: You're referring to a 2013 piece in the London Review of Books, in which Hersh scrutinizes the Obama administration's narrative that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people. He wrote, "Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on the 21st of August." Later on, however, it was revealed that Assad's regime was responsible for the attack. You challenged him about this in the film.

Seymour Hersh: I read this stuff now, and I say to myself, "I really misjudged him." I saw him two, or three, or four times, and I didn't think he was capable of doing what he did, period. Let's call that wrong. Let's call that very much wrong.

Laura Poitras: Is that an example of getting too close to power?

Seymour Hersh: Of course. What else is it? I never thought he was Mother Teresa, but I thought he was okay. If I have made a claim in prior interviews to be perfect, I would now withdraw it. That's all. I wasn't perfect.

Micah Loewinger: This is hard to wrap my head around as a viewer because you have documented a long career defined by his deep skepticism of power and really lifting up the victims of state violence. What do you make of this contradiction? How did he fall into this trap?

Laura Poitras: I share exactly your perspective on this. How is it possible, given his body of work and where he's consistently taken a position against power? Again, only Sy can speak to that, but I knew that I needed to ask it in the film.

Micah Loewinger: Another example of your skepticism of his sourcing was his 2023 bombshell report on Substack about the Nord Stream pipeline. This is the pipeline which had allowed Russia to transport gas to the EU. In 2022, there was mysterious explosions that damaged the pipeline, and Hersh wrote a piece alleging that the CIA had collaborated with Norway to blow it up. You asked Hersh about his decision to base this piece on a single source. In response to that, he says--

Seymour Hersh: So what? So what? Legitimate criticism. Absolutely, right?

Laura Poitras: Same one?

Seymour Hersh: Yes. The only point I'm saying is that, of course, what am I going to do? I can't write about who I know else was brought in from the army of the Air Force, because I'm exposing them. Even if there's nine sources, sometimes it's much better just to make it one. I'm sorry to tell you that. Well, because you don't want about sources, say in the State Department and the CIA both agree.

Laura Poitras: What if the source got it wrong, and it's a single source? What do you do?

Seymour Hersh: Then I've got 20 years of working with the guy that I've been wrong on. Time after time, I'm told things that turn out to be right.

Laura Poitras: Relying on a single source is very dangerous. It's something that I feel critical of and felt that there's this kind of skepticism that need to be brought into the film. I think there's still a lot we don't know about what happened with the Nord Stream sabotage, but there have been a lot of journalists who've reported a very different narrative.

Micah Loewinger: One thing that fascinated me about the film is, of course, he's getting called nasty names by Richard Nixon. There are examples of other journalists who are critical of him as a reporter and some of his tactics. Then there's the scrutiny that he gets from the public. We see him on C-SPAN taking callers. It's clear that throughout his career, there was a segment of the population that didn't support what he was doing, that didn't actually want to see the truth that he was trying to reveal.

Laura Poitras: Right. That's what the film is all about: to ask the hard questions in the moment when the stakes are the highest. He got a lot of pushback because there was a kind of march to war. If you're looking at Vietnam or if you're looking at Iraq, we have a consensus, looking back in history, that both of these wars were catastrophes, right? In the moment, that's not the narrative that we were being told, and that the legacy media, in large part, were telling the public. This is what the crux of the whole film is, is that we have to be asking those questions. Otherwise, we're going to keep repeating these patterns.

Micah Loewinger: Right now, with the Trump administration, we're seeing what I hope is not the beginning of a potential new march to war with Venezuela. The stakes for good national security reporting remain extremely high. At the same time, it's getting harder and harder for legitimate investigative reporters to do their work. Spaces like the Pentagon and the White House that were once more open to journalists to do work-- I see you shaking your head.

Laura Poitras: I'm going to push back a little. I don't think the problem is investigative journalists. I think the problem is government lying and institutions not backing investigative journalists. I don't think journalists are going to find the truth at Pentagon press briefings. I'm sorry. I just don't think that's where truth is going to be found. That's where lies are going to be. I believe investigative journalists will continue to fight and continue to actually risk their lives, which is what we're seeing around the world.

Journalists going to prison, journalists being assassinated. Journalists are willing to fight for the truth. The question I have is about the institutional support for that work and the willingness to take on the government when they come after you. Currently, I'm very concerned about the capitulation of large media organizations to government pressure. Both the settlement around 60 Minutes and Paramount and ABC not fighting for the First Amendment, I think, is the biggest threat we're seeing. That's coming from institutions, not from journalists doing their jobs.

Micah Loewinger: You do believe that in the lead-up to some of our wars, mainstream journalists were too credulous.

Laura Poitras: They were cheerleading.

Micah Loewinger: I'd like to know what you think journalists can learn from the film and from reporters like Sy Hersh.

Laura Poitras: I think we need to use the words to describe what we're seeing. I'll go back to Sy's reporting around torture. When he reported about Abu Ghraib, there were editorial guidelines in the legacy institutions not to use the word "torture" to describe CIA torture, that they were supposed to use enhanced interrogation techniques. It's the job of journalists to be adversarial and to report the facts as they see them, regardless of the consequences, without fear or favor.

What we're seeing in Gaza, how can we look at a population that's being starved and civilians being bombed for two years and not call it a genocide? I just think we have to use the words that we know to describe what is happening. The erosion of trust in the media is because the public often feels lied to. They feel lied to by their government, and they feel that the press is also part of the lying.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Poitras is an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. Laura, thank you very much.

Laura Poitras: Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

[MUSIC - Meridian String Quartet: Heroes]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Macy Hanzlik-Barend. Travis Mannon is our video producer. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul and Sam Baer. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[MUSIC - Meridian String Quartet: Heroes]

 

Copyright © 2026 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.