CBS News is inviting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to join them at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week—to sit at their table, surrounded by journalists he’s banned from Pentagon press conferences.

Many, including journalists who work at CBS, are calling this invitation distasteful, given Hegseth’s attacks on truth, the First Amendment, and journalism. However, given CBS’s hard pivot to the right after being absorbed into the Ellisons’ media sphere—and with warmonger Bari Weiss at the helm—maybe it’s just what makes sense for CBS. This is just one example of mainstream media not only refusing to ask questions of war criminals, but blatantly befriending them.

This move is particularly interesting given Hegseth’s last few months.

He oversaw and commanded the operation that kidnapped the head of state of another country when the US attacked Venezuela earlier this year. He also oversaw targeted strikes that extrajudicially killed Venezuelan fishermen under the auspices of drug smuggling. Just last month, he started the US war against Iran by using AI to target an elementary school in Minab, killing nearly 200 children in an instant. He’s been in lockstep with President Donald Trump in terms of genocidal rhetoric toward seemingly any country he wakes up hating that day. Now, the Hegseth War Department is reportedly planning a war on Cuba—a country 90 miles away from the United States that has done absolutely nothing to us except try to send emergency medical aid after Hurricane Katrina.

Yet the media keeps framing these threats as if he’s bluffing, as if he hasn’t ordered horrific military actions before, as if the blood of 168 little girls won’t still be dripping from his hands as they sit across from him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

The Minab school bombing has seemingly stuck with people in terms of Hegseth’s brutality. Surely, the deliberate targeting of an elementary school is a war crime. Shortly after the bombing, members of Congress submitted a list of 10 questions for Hegseth to answer. It included questions about the use of artificial intelligence in target selection, what steps he took to........

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