Gen. Jack Keane reacts to Pentagon’s new press access policy

Fox News senior strategic analyst and a retired Gen. Jack Keane offered his reaction to the Trump administration’s new press access policy for the Pentagon during his appearance on “Special Report” Tuesday. 

“It doesn’t seem like the whole story is being told to our viewers here,” Keane told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “What they’re really doing — they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that would be their story. That’s not journalism. Journalism is going out and finding the story and getting all the facts to support it.”

“No one’s going to walk in and bang on the door of a four-star general or a senior civilian policy leader in the Pentagon. I never had that, but I did have journalists chasing a story or something was going on with the Army, and those things are legitimate,” he continued. “If anything, what would frustrate us at times is we didn’t beat you to it, and something bad is happening, and we’re getting our act together — and sometimes — ‘Let’s wait a couple of days before we talk about that’ and you guys are on it. And that’s journalism.” 

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Keane said he wanted his generals trained to interact with the press so they would “welcome” journalists and not be intimidated by them.

“See the media as your conduit to the American people, and that’s how I always saw it and believed in supporting it,” Keane said. “There were times when stories were done that made me flinch a little bit, yeah — but that’s usually because we had done something that wasn’t as good as we should’ve done it.”

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The Pentagon, under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, is enforcing a new policy requiring journalists to agree to specific conditions in order to be granted access. Many news organizations are pushing back against the policy. 

“Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues. The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press,” ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FOX News Media and NBC News said in a joint statement.

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