By Ben Zeisloft February 25, 2025 at 6:00am
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had zero tolerance on Monday for one particular loaded question from a reporter.
Hegseth was meeting with Saudi Arabian leaders when he took a few questions from the media.
Fresh on their minds was, of course, President Donald Trump firing Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth meanwhile fired Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force James Slife.
Trump then announced that he would replace Brown with retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine.
The legacy media, already miffed by the firing of the previous leaders, who had pushed diversity programs, bitterly latched onto Brown’s ousting.
One reporter asked Hegseth, “Why did you select an underqualified, retired lieutenant general to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”
Hegseth’s reply was rather straightforward.
“I’m going to choose to reject your unqualified question,” he said. “Who’s next?”
Fake News loser: “Why did you select an underqualified retired lieutenant general to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”@SecDef: “I’m going to choose to reject your unqualified question. Who’s next?”
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 24, 2025
Did the reporter deserve to be hit as hard as Hegseth hit him?
The message here is simple.
The new Trump administration invites transparency, as evidenced by Trump participating in far more press engagement than his predecessor.
But they expect the reporters who cover the federal government to be fair, not to be partisan activists with a chip on their shoulder masquerading as serious journalists.
Trump has long been an expert at cutting straight through the ideologues in the media, confronting them over nasty questions and refusing to play their games.
That virtue is now filtering into the Cabinet and the rest of the administration.
There is, of course, Hegseth’s curt and clear takedown of that particular reporter.
But notice also that the official White House Rapid Response page called the reporter a “Fake News loser” when sharing the footage of Hegseth.
That’s an accurate title, and like their boss, the staffers behind that account were not afraid to use it.
This is definitely a new era for the media in our country.
They were allowed to peddle whichever false narratives they chose for years, if not decades, and they were not used to being confronted on their nonsense.
Hegseth rightly called them “unqualified.”
They’d better get qualified, or else they’re going to find themselves increasingly “uninvited” from places like the Pentagon.
Ben Zeisloft is the editor of The Republic Sentinel, a conservative news outlet owned and operated by Christians. He is a former staff reporter for The Daily Wire and has written for The Spectator, Campus Reform, and other conservative news outlets. Ben graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with concentrations in business economics and marketing.
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