Pete Hegseth kicks legacy media out of Pentagon press office, replaces them with NYPost, Breitbart, OAN, HuffPost

According to a report by The Daily Mail, a memo revealed that The New York Times, NBC News, NPR, and Politico have been ordered to vacate their Pentagon office spaces by Valentine’s Day. Replacing them will be The New York Post, One America News Network (OAN), and Breitbart News Network. One more left-wing outlet, the Huffington Post, will also be granted office space for one year. While HuffPost did not request office space, spokesperson Lizzie Grams expressed optimism in a comment to NBC News.

“If the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth are interested in more hard-hitting coverage of their stewardship of the Defense Department from HuffPost, we are ready to deliver,” Grams said.

The decision, announced Friday, is part of Hegseth’s plan to implement a rotating schedule for outlets to use office space. Each rotation will last one year and will include one outlet from print, online, television, and radio be filtered to “allow a new outlet from the same medium that has not had the unique opportunity to report as a resident member of the Pentagon Press Corps.”

The New York Times criticized the move, calling it a “concerning development” and accusing the administration of expelling “independent, fact-based news outlets” from the Pentagon’s press spaces.

"The Department of Defense has the largest discretionary budget in the government, millions of Americans in uniform under its direction and control of a vast arsenal funded by taxpayers,” a spokesperson for The New York Times said.

Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot defended the directive, stating it is intended to “broaden access to the limited space of the Correspondents' Corridor to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalist value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon.” More than two dozen news organizations report from the Pentagon.

The decision follows an announcement from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that independent journalists, including podcasters and social media influencers, will now be eligible to apply for press access to the White House briefing room. Leavitt stated that the administration is also restoring access to those who had their credentials “wrongly revoked” under the Biden administration.