The New York Times has come under fire from The Federalist for what it calls “nakedly lying” about Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming her public role is unprecedented. The conservative outlet argues that the Times is ignoring its own past reporting that celebrated a similar—if not more active—role for a previous Pentagon spouse.
In a Friday column, The Federalist highlighted a recent Times story that opened with the line, “There has never been a Pentagon spouse quite like Jennifer Hegseth.” The piece described her attending official events, meeting servicemembers, working out with troops on the U.S.S. Boxer in Singapore, and accompanying her husband to the D-Day commemoration in Normandy. The Times characterized the imagery as casting her as “the first lady of the Pentagon,” suggesting this was a shocking and unprecedented development.
But The Federalist notes that the Times itself once used that exact phrase to describe Janet Langhart-Cohen, the wife of Clinton-era Secretary of Defense William Cohen. In a 1999 story, the Times celebrated Langhart-Cohen’s active public role, including her weekly television show broadcast to armed forces bases around the globe and her joint public appearances with her husband. The 1999 piece even quoted the phrase “First Lady of the Pentagon” in describing her.
“Does anyone at The New York Times read The New York Times?” asks the Federalist column, written by an author who points out that a simple Google search for Janet Langhart-Cohen returns numerous results describing her as “the first lady of the Pentagon.” The column argues that the Times’ current framing of Jennifer Hegseth as a unique phenomenon is either a failure of institutional memory or a deliberate distortion.
The Federalist also lists other Pentagon spouses who took on significant public roles, including Stephanie Carter, Leah Esper, and Joyce Rumsfeld, and notes that the Times story is illustrated with a photo of Stephanie Carter meeting with troops while her husband Ash Carter was Secretary of Defense under Obama. The column argues that such involvement is “normal behavior” for many SecDefs’ wives.
The criticism centers on the Times’ apparent double standard: celebrating a Democratic Pentagon spouse’s activism in 1999 while portraying a Republican one’s similar conduct as unprecedented and troubling in 2026. The Federalist calls the coverage “pathetic” and questions whether any editors at the Times “know how to use Google.”
Neither The New York Times nor Jennifer Hegseth has publicly responded to the column as of this writing. The Times’ original article on Hegseth remains accessible on its website. The Federalist’s column is the latest in a series of conservative critiques of mainstream media coverage of the Trump administration’s defense leadership.
The controversy underscores the broader debate over the role of political spouses and the lens through which their actions are reported. While the Times framed Hegseth’s visibility as a departure from tradition, The Federalist argues that history—and the Times’ own archive—proves otherwise. As the column concludes, “Is there an editor in the building who knows how to use Google?”
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/08/21/the-new-york-times-is-nakedly-lying-about-jennifer-hegseth-and-its-pathetic/