Years ago I traveled to the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Fox News for an interview with Pete Hegseth . It was 2017, during Donald Trump ’s first term in office, and Hegseth was a middling cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend whose flamboyant commentary had attracted the attention of the president.

Sitting in an airy cafeteria high up in the News Corp building, I asked Hegseth where he got his news. “I read the failing New York Times, ” he said. He then claimed, in all seriousness, that before reading the print edition of the Times every morning, he would take a Sharpie and write “FAILING” above the paper’s header.

The declaration struck me as absurd, and we moved on. I did not believe that this man, an ambitious cable-news host educated at Princeton and Harvard, wrote “FA

See Full Page