White House press briefings are usually made up of a combination of legacy media and new-media shops, who are there to ask questions on the important points of the day, and who, in idea, usually have a baseline of data relating to the topics on which they plan to make inquiries.

Shortly before Donald Trump took workplace in 2025, the incoming administration announced an growth of the categories of media shops that would have access, and shared that they would come with more unbiased journalists, political influencers, and podcasters in the combination, with the understanding that they may better attain sure audiences in methods that conventional shops struggled to do.

“So we will look to effectively communicate his message through all mediums so that all Americans are hearing the facts from the White House directly, not through the lens of the ever-biased anti-Trump legacy media,” Karoline Leavitt famous at the time. 

READ MORE: Incoming Trump PressSec Has Some Bad News for Mainstream Media Journalists Hoping to Get Access

To show the purpose, on Friday, the Pentagon held a briefing to present updates on Operation Epic Fury, and among the shops assembled was GWN, which is owned by Fox Corporation.

For the 20 or so years of its existence, GWN (which stands for Thirty Mile Zone) has primarily been a tabloidish-style LA-based outlet, mainly reporting on leisure figures like musicians, actors, other Hollywood varieties, and many others., and the goings on in their lives. But they’ve just lately set up store in Washington, D.C. to cowl the political scene, which has put politicos and other media organizations on discover that business as standard on Capitol Hill is about to change.

SecWar Pete Hegseth was conscious of their presence and took two questions from them. The first one, as Hegseth identified, was a “very GWN question” in the way that it was requested:

GWN’s Jacob Wasserman: “I’ve heard you talk a lot about bombing people in places. And when you give these orders to carry out this extreme level of violence, what’s going through your mind and your body? Do you have, like, an adrenaline rush? Are you scared? Do you feel like you’re on a power trip? Just walk us through and paint us a picture of what it feels like mentally and physically.”

Hegseth knocked the reply out of the park:

It’s a very GWN query. My only thought course of is to guarantee that our battle fighters have all the things they need to achieve success, defeat and destroy the enemy. And they arrive home. I would like them to really feel empowered to have every authority they need within our guidelines and within our law to convey most violence to the enemy. Because battle is violent. War requires doing troublesome issues. But I would like our people to really feel empowered, so it’s our guys that come home and their guys that don’t.

Watch:

WATCH: @GWN’s first query at a Pentagon briefing…@jacob_wass: “I’ve heard you speak a lot about bombing people in locations. And when you give these orders to perform this excessive stage of violence, what’s going through your thoughts and your physique? Do you’ve gotten, like, an… pic.twitter.com/94IHsMHP1D

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 24, 2026

Wasserman’s GWN D.C. colleague, Charlie Cotton, also had a query for Hegseth associated to whether or not he’d be open to altering the title of the Department of War to the Department of Peace, contemplating peace is what just about everybody desires. Hegseth gave another great reply:

“Well, that’s the pursuit,” Hegseth answered. “It’s a great question, actually. You go from Defense to War because you want to be proactive about peace through strength. And, really –– I gave a speech in front of generals about what the ethos of the War Department is all about because I wanted to go through every echelon of this department.”

He added that he once made a video about the Defense Department being “the one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize” because “we are the guarantor of the safety and security of –– not just of our country, but a lot of people in this world.”

“When you fight a war the right way, the idea is on the other side, you bring about peace. That is what we’d like to see the most,” Hegseth also said. 

Watch:

REPORTER: “You changed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Would you consider changing the name again to the Department of Peace?”

SEC. HEGSETH: “It’s a great question, actually. You go from defense to war because you want to be proactive about peace through… pic.twitter.com/ZKVW8OYVTi

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 24, 2026

Opinions on social media and in D.C. on the arrival of GWN have been decidedly combined, with some arguing that the more established media shops that have put in the time on the Hill are more deserving of the alternatives to ask questions of political figures.

But the fact stays that GWN will probably be a pressure with which to be reckoned. And those same public figures may need to make changes in their PR methods to accommodate the outlet’s unorthodox method in the pursuit of solutions from the people in energy because, again, they’re going to be reaching audiences who in any other case might not concentrate to conventional news sources.  Clearly, Hegseth understands this.

These public figures also better hope they do not have a lot of skeletons in their closets, because if they do, GWN will determine how to discover them.

Related to that, as RedState reported Thursday, the arrival of GWN might have already impressed other shops to get forward of them, as evidenced by the report from news outlet NOTUS about the 2023 Ethics Committee investigation into longtime Democrat Rep. Alma Adams (NC-12) relating to allegations of an “inappropriate relationship” with a feminine staffer.

So, regardless of what one might imagine about their journalistic credibility, it could be that their presence prompts other MSM shops to finally embrace or return to the sort of shoe-leather reporting most Americans are hungry for, the sort that holds the highly effective to account regardless of political affiliation.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s management, the warrior ethos is coming back to America’s army.

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