The Trump Administration instituted a new and unpreceded policy known as the ‘Pentagon Media Rotation Program’ on Feb. 14, 2025, removing some news organizations from their office spaces at the Pentagon. Left-leaning news networks, such as The New York Times, NPR, NBC News and Politico, are being replaced with right-wing news networks including the NY Post, One America, Breitbart and HuffPost.
Journalism teacher and former journalist Wayne Woolley describes the background of these new pro-Trump media outlets now working at the Pentagon.
“The news organizations they’re being replaced with have almost no experience covering national defense or the Pentagon,” said Woolley.
While the ‘Media Rotation Program’ and these conservative networks are largely unheard of, the decision to enforce this program is similar to other executive decisions made by the current administration. Woolley relates the ‘media rotation program’ to the recent censorship imposed on The Associated Press (AP).
“This change is not unlike the White House deciding to ban The Associated Press from covering certain media briefings,” said Woolley. “The administration said they did it because The Associated Press declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.”
Many of the news outlets being removed from the Pentagon are left-leaning outlets, further straining the relationship between certain news organizations and the government.
U.S. history teacher and Civics Club advisor Bill Clark knows that new administrations bring new policies every four years, and is interested to see how long the changes last..
“The relationship between the press and the government is and has been growing apart. With a new administration comes change, not always change that is agreed upon by all,” said Clark.
It is apparent that the Trump administration does not find these left leaning news networks, such as The New York Times and NPR, reliable, despite them being the primary news source for many students at Communications High School.
Junior Isabella San Filippo of Wall Township shares that she gets all of her news from television channels, the New York Times and AP News; however, she believes the decision to remove these news organizations from the Pentagon is logical and well thought out.
“From a logical standpoint, if you know a news organization is going to purposefully make you look bad in the press, of course you wouldn’t want them working out of the Pentagon,” San Filippo said. “At the end of the day, it is a political power play.”
None of the news organizations who were kicked out, however, have done anything other than accurately report the news from the Pentagon, which is responsible for the nation’s defense and affects every American, according to media observers. The reporting from the news organizations that replaced them has been widely discredited as biased and inaccurate, according to those observers.
The Trump Administration’s ‘Pentagon Media Rotation Program’ appears to be changing how the government interacts with the press, with clear intentions to limit the influence of certain media outlets.
In a time when dynamics between the press and the government are changing, San Filippo offered a reminder of the foundational principles that guide the United States.
“We have freedom of speech in America, and I think that is something that is truly important and sets us apart in a lot of ways from other countries. It is a core value, and that should not be lost.”
