Conservative media Benedict Arnold — aka Oliver Darcy, now helming his own website, Status — opened his Thursday night newsletter with a 1,000-word-plus dispatch of Pentagon correspondents melting down about the Pete Hegseth-led department and his chief spokesman, Sean Parnell.
In essence, however, Darcy provided a helpful reminder to those dealing with liberal journalists: You can never fully trust them to abide by their own rules of when something is “off the record.” If it makes for a good story or they view you as the enemy, they’ll stab you in the back.
Darcy blared from the get-go this would be a safe space for the sad journos: “Pressed at the Pentagon; Inside a tense off-the-record meeting, the Pentagon’s new press chief confronted reporters and indicated they will do away with the regular travel pool, doubling down on Pete Hegseth’s anti-media approach.”
Ah, there it is. “Anti-media.” Darcy, Brian Stelter, et al love tossing that term around to describe spaces such as this one that — gasp — believe the corporate media have a liberal bias!
It seemed simple enough as Parnell gathered “a few dozen journalists for an off-the-record meeting to introduce himself” and “started off cordially enough” with Parnell admitting he’s not another “comms guy” and thus not what they’re used to, but hoped they’d get along.
“But the meeting quickly went off the rails when reporters in the room were given the opportunity to ask questions. In one particularly heated moment, a reporter asked Parnell why the Pentagon had set up a rapid response account on X that effectively exists to trash the press,” Darcy whined.
This, one source said who violated the off-the-record rules, was when the meeting turned “bleak and horrible.” Darcy described it as “strange and adversarial.”
Given this was from Darcy (and thus a man whose hatred of Trump runs through his veins), it’s hard to say whether this was accurate, particularly his source’s bizarre insistence Parnell demanded they swear loyalty to the administration (click “expand”):
Parnell told the reporter who asked about the rapid response X account that he had recently gone through their social media feed and voiced displeasure with some of their comments about Trump. The press secretary then asked the room full of assembled journalists whether they were "rooting" for the president to succeed. When he was not given the answer he had hoped for, Parnell, clearly displeased, questioned why it would be unfair for him to expect that the reporters cheer on Trump. A reporter answered that it was not their job to root for or against a subject that they cover, but to simply report the facts.
Matters only grew worse from there. When a reporter asked why the Pentagon media affairs department was not responding to press inquiries in a timely manner, but rapidly firing off posts on X to slam reporters, Parnell quipped back, "So it's our job to let you publish stories that trash the warfighter?" Again, reporters were bewildered and taken aback by the response. They wondered, what does Parnell mean when he accuses the press of trashing service members? Simply reporting information that the Pentagon doesn't like?
Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon reporters sound like college students traumatized by the existence of conservative speakers on campus: “Some reporters, I'm told, grew emotional over the accusation, noting that they have been covering the military for many years. They pointed out that in several cases it is often the reporters telling the warfighter what is actually happening. In other cases, strong reporting has spurred changes that have improved the lives of service members[.]”
Apparently, Darcy said, “[o]ne reporter...asked Parnell whether he had ever read their reporting” and he replied “in a snarky manner, that he had, suggesting that it revealed something terrible about who they are.”
“One of the reporters” allegedly said this was proof the Pete Hegseth-led Pentagon wants to “discredit and paint any questioning of their policies as an attack on the troops[.]”
The leaks continued when Darcy claimed Parnell's deputy, John Ullyot, assailed the assembled journalists for the media’s past coverage of then-candidate Trump ‘even after he was shot in the ear and got up’” and covered up Biden’s decline, which Pentagon reporters allegedly asserted it wasn’t their job.
Again, take all that with a grain of salt.
Taken as a whole, Darcy said “some of the assembled reporters said they wanted to have a good relationship with Parnell, but that he was making it difficult—if not impossible—with his hostile approach.”
Ah, there it is. A promise for hostility.
Darcy’s thoughts were predictably, whining a Hegseth Pentagon will be based on “disengag[ing]” from the press and “elevating loyalists” who will be “friendly propagandists who won’t challenge their narrative” and instead “reshape reality itself.”
How cute. He essentially described how the liberal media largely acted during the Biden administration and largely moved on from Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin going AWOL.
