Folded News

Tag: government coercion

  • The Pentagon is squashing freedom of the press

    The Pentagon has been the source of news regarding war since 1947, post-WWII. The Pentagon, where the Department of War currently operates, has long granted journalists access throughout military conflicts in which the United States was involved. Now, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the rules have changed. On Friday, March 20th, 2026, a federal judge blocked the restrictions the Pentagon placed on journalists seeking transparency for the world. The Pentagon did not follow the new rules set out. Instead, the Pentagon imposed restrictions on journalists, requiring escorts and the closure of the press wing. The Trump administration has been moving toward a more favorable reporting stance, with right-wing publications having access to the information since the Iran war started. Now, as we are nearly a month into the United States / Israel and Iran war, millions of Americans are asking for answers, but the government is restricting access to information.

    Many are calling for the impeachment or resignation of key members of the Trump administration, such as Hegseth, Bondi, and, with Noem losing her position, the American public is one step closer to transparency and core leadership that represents the American interest and the values of the long-standing experiment on democracy in the western hemisphere.

    One cool symbol of that relationship was the “Correspondents’ Corridor,” a section of the Pentagon where journalists had desks right next to defense officials. By 2012, people were already saying the corridor was about 40 years old, which would date it to the early 1970s.

    That access has always expanded and contracted during conflict, demonstrating the complex relationship between military operations and the media. In the 1991 Gulf War, for example, the military’s use of pools and tightly controlled briefings became a major flashpoint, raising significant questions regarding transparency and information dissemination.

    Press-freedom advocates later described the Gulf War as one of the most restrictive modern conflicts for journalists, with the Pentagon channeling information through official briefings and largely limiting independent newsgathering. This careful orchestration of communication was intended to control the narrative and prevent misinformation, yet it ultimately led to widespread criticism from various media organizations and civil liberties groups, who argued that such restrictions undermined the essential role of a free press as a watchdog in a democratic society.

    The same battles over access, escort rules, and message control carried into later wars, including Afghanistan and Iraq, where similar restrictions were imposed, often leading to heated debates about the rights of journalists in war zones and the implications for democratic transparency. These debates intensified as technology advanced, enabling citizens to capture and disseminate information instantaneously, thus further complicating the notion of controlled narrative.

    The ongoing struggle for journalistic access highlights the tension between national security interests and the public’s right to know, a narrative that continues to evolve with each new conflict, revealing the critical balance that must be struck between safeguarding sensitive information and upholding the foundational principles of democracy. The lawsuit by the New York Times in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleged that the Defense Department’s policy changes last year gave it free rein to freeze out reporters and news outlets for coverage it did not like, in violation of the Constitution’s protections for free speech and due process. The government disputed that characterization and said the policy is reasonable and necessary for national security, arguing that the increasing complexity of modern warfare necessitates such measures to ensure that operational security is not compromised while still attempting to facilitate some level of transparency where possible.

    U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said in his ruling “more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is ​doing”

    The memo outlining the changes can be found below:

    IMPLEMENTATION-OF-REVISED-MEDIA-IN-BRIEFDownload

    With all these changes, does the Department of War honor the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press?

  • Brendan Carr’s Fight Against Transparency

    Carr is the American lawyer who leads the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC. The FCC oversees multiple aspects of American infrastructure related to broadcasting and communication. The router in your home is required to be approved by the FCC, and even the broadcast television you see, which is the old style of TV with an antenna, not cable or streaming. You may have listened to a radio station overseen by the FCC, and even the fiber-optic communication lines across the seafloor are overseen by the FCC. The FCC has a stake in almost all ways news is disseminated. They do not have a say in an independent journalist like The Penny Tribune.

    On social media, Carr Stated,

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    Carr’s September 2025 assault on Jimmy Kimmel was not just another culture-war flare-up. It was a revealing snapshot of how regulatory power can be repurposed into political intimidation. After Kimmel made remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Carr condemned them as “some of the sickest conduct possible” and openly suggested there was a “path forward for suspension.” The consequences came fast: ABC suspended the show indefinitely, while Nexstar and Sinclair pulled it from their stations. Kimmel returned less than a week later, but by then the point had already been made. The threat had landed.

    What mattered most was not just Carr’s outrage, but the mechanism behind it. He warned broadcasters that continuing to air the program could expose them to “fines or license revocation from the FCC,” then delivered the kind of line that sounds less like public service and more like a political enforcer flexing state power: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

    And that is the real story. Because this did not emerge in a vacuum. Carr has increasingly built a public record that suggests a willingness to blur the line between communications oversight and ideological punishment. The Kimmel episode did not feel aberrational. It felt consistent. Another moment in a broader pattern where the language of regulation is used not simply to govern the public airwaves, but to pressure media institutions, shape editorial behavior, and send a message about who can speak freely without consequence.

    That is what makes this bigger than late-night television. When a federal regulator begins sounding less like an independent steward of the public interest and more like a partisan actor willing to weaponize licensing authority, the danger is not just censorship in the formal sense. It is the creation of a climate where media companies begin disciplining themselves before the government ever has to. Fear does the work. Compliance follows. And the public is left calling it oversight when it looks a lot more like coercion.

    When Brenden Carr threatened media companies, he was threatening the public to restrict access to information. The threat began with the reporting of the Iran war started by the Trump administration nearly three weeks ago, on February 28th 2026 by media companies that Trump has deemed to be in opposition after the American airstrike of a girls’ school, killing over one hundred and fifty people.

    Supporting indepenedent journalism is the right path forward in this instance. The Penny Tribune has no agency to get permission from, we are the press, we will share the truth unfiltered and indicitaive of the stkes of a ever changing corrupt government with facist ideology.