Host Joe Scarborough noted near the top of the segment that there is "good news" to be found in how many media outlets have pushed back and refused to sign the new policy, including Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and The AP. The Atlantic writer Nancy Youssef concurred, telling viewers, "I think it's a remarkable thing that every organization, nearly every organization, has come forward and said, 'We will not agree to this.'"

"We're doing so because it goes against the principles of the First Amendment," she explained. "Our responsibility is not to put out what the Pentagon wants us to put out, but to put out information that the American public needs to know about an organization that takes nearly a trillion of taxpayer dollars and has the awesome responsibility of potentially deploying America's sons and daughters into harm's way." Scarborough echoed Youssef's sentiments, emphasizing the need for transparency within the Pentagon.

"This isn't about Pete Hegseth or members of his family that don't want the press around. This is about protecting the men and women in uniform from civilians that get put in positions and generals who may make bad, boneheaded decisions, not only maliciously, but sometimes just -- everybody's human -- they make mistakes," Scarborough added. "But in the Pentagon, when you make mistakes, you have men and women sacrificing for this country who die."

"The idea that these people are not to be asked questions -- it's not the Soviet Union," he further noted. "This is the United States of America, thank you very much." You can watch the full "Morning Joe" segment in the video below.

MSNBC National Affairs Analyst John Heilemann then said the press policy is indicative of how incorrectly Secretary of Defense/War Hegseth views the relationship between the American press and the federal government.

"There's a million things to say about this. Some of them have already been said, related to how deeply, profoundly antithetical this is to the values of the First Amendment," Heilemann said. "It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between journalists and government and what our role is and how the government, in some ways, even benefits from the discomfort that the press puts it in when it holds [the] government accountable and honest."

Even worse, Heilemann warned that the Trump administration's latest free press crackdown could be viewed as an attempt to "institutionalize propaganda." "All administrations put out press releases and try to spin stories their way," the MSNBC analyst acknowledged. "This administration, in the age of social media, has probably the most sophisticated and most advanced kind of propagandistic capacities and skill set of any administration in [U.S.] history. But this is trying to kind of make that the institutional order of operations."

"It's not going to work," Heilemann concluded. "Apart from the fact that it's profoundly wrong, it's not going to have anything like the effect that Pete Hegseth thinks it's going to have."