Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, while anchoring The Sunday Briefing on October 5, 2025, aired a lengthy interview he had conducted the previous day with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the sidelines of the Navy-Air Force football game. Hegseth, who was plucked by President Donald Trump from the cast of Fox & Friends' weekend edition to serve as the Pentagon’s leader, hasn’t returned to the network since.

Over that 11-month period, Trump and Hegseth embroiled the U.S. military in an open-ended war with Iran; the U.S. military continued to carry out their policy of illegally bombing purported drug cartel boats at sea and oversaw a regime change in Venezuela; and the defense secretary repeatedly came under fire for purging the top ranks of the armed forces.

Hegseth’s disappearance from Fox is notable as he initially remained a fixture on the network’s airwaves — his interview with Doocy marked Hegseth’s 24th Fox interview since he was sworn in on January 25, 2025, according to a Media Matters review. And while the defense secretary maintains an antagonistic relationship with the press, he has not abandoned media appearances since his most recent Fox hit, sitting down with CBS News for interviews in January and June.

It’s unclear why Hegseth has not appeared on Fox since October 5 of last year — but the timing is conspicuous. Just days after that interview, Fox became one of numerous outlets to condemn the defense secretary’s stringent new restrictions on Pentagon reporters.

When Doocy asked Hegseth during the interview about “leaks coming out the Pentagon,” the defense secretary not only decried the leakers but said journalists were “disgusting” for attempting to “solicit things like that.” (Pentagon reporters quickly disputed Hegseth’s claims about their methods on social media.)

He went on to tease the newly proposed press restrictions, which included requiring credentialed journalists “to sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that has not been authorized for release — including unclassified information.”

“We're setting clear rules at the Pentagon,” he told Doocy. “We're not playing games. We're not allowing everybody to roam around the building.”

“Yes, you can be in the press area, briefing room, but if you want to move around the building, you're going to have a badge,” he explained. “It's going to be clear. You're going to be escorted when you do so. We have the expectation that you're not soliciting classified or sensitive information.”

“The Pentagon press corps can squeal all they want, we're taking these things seriously,” he added. “They can report, they just need to make sure they're following rules.”

The Pentagon Press Association's efforts to negotiate over the restrictions failed, and Fox joined every major news organization as well as some right-wing outlets like Newsmax in publicly refusing to sign the new access rules.

Fox, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News issued the following joint statement on October 14, 2025 — nine days after Hegseth’s final Fox interview aired:

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.

Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier read the statement on Special Report that night. His guest, Fox senior strategic analyst Jack Keane, a retired general who served as U.S. Army vice chief of staff, then laid into both the restrictions and the Pentagon’s motives.

“What they're really doing, they want to spoon feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story,” Keane said. “That's not journalism. Journalism is going out and finding the story and getting all the facts to support it. And that no one's going to walk in and bang on a door of a four star general or or senior civilian policy leader in the Pentagon.”

Keane went on to say that when he served at the Pentagon, he always saw the press as “your conduit to the American people,” adding: “Were there times when stories were done that make me flinch a little bit? Yeah. But that's usually because we had done something that wasn't as good as we should have done it.”

“Well, we're all standing in solidarity — almost all of us — and we hope that changes,” Baier replied.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters