The New York Times is once again suing the Pentagon over its press rules, this time challenging a policy implemented in March that requires reporters to be escorted by Defense Department officials. In a lawsuit filed Monday, The New York Times argues the rules are “patently retaliatory, utterly unreasonable, and manifestly arbitrary and capricious.”
The lawsuit is the latest development in the fight over press access at the Pentagon during the second Trump administration. Last fall, the Defense Department asked members of the press corps to agree to a new policy or “lose access to press credentials and Pentagon workspaces,” reported Reuters. Among other restrictions limiting unescorted access within the Pentagon, the policy stated that reporters “who solicit or encourage personnel to disclose the information without authorization may be deemed a safety risk” could lose their credentials, Axios reported at the time. Dozens of outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax, refused to sign a statement acknowledging the rules.
The new press access rules prompted the Times to sue for the first time in December, alleging the Pentagon’s policy violated the outlet’s First Amendment rights by giving “free rein to grant or deny Pentagon access to journalists and media outlets on the basis of viewpoint.” It also alleged that the policy’s vague language violated the Due Process Clause because it authorized “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”
In March, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Times, blocking the policy and ordering the Pentagon to reinstate press credentials for seven of the paper’s journalists, according to the Associated Press. Although some legacy media reporters had been let into the briefings, the Pentagon Press Association called for the restoration of all “press passes to all reporters who decided to give them up rather than sign the Department of Defense’s restrictive new policy,” reported The Hill at the time.
Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell expressed his disagreement with the ruling, writing on X that the “court removed every provision that allowed the Department to screen press credential holders for security risks.” He said the Pentagon would appeal the ruling and unveiled an interim policy that would comply with the judge’s orders. In addition to closing the Correspondents’ Corridor workspace, the new policy requires all journalists to be escorted by Defense Department officials.
The New York Times’ latest lawsuit challenges the Pentagon’s newest policy, claiming its purpose “is to restrict journalists’ ability to do what they have always done: ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”
It’s understandable why the Pentagon would want to limit unsupervised interactions between the press and public officials, given how the Defense Department has failed to justify its unpopular and costly war in Iran. But doing so limits the media’s ability to hold public officials accountable.
In the documentary Cover-Up about the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Hersh recalls how, as a reporter for the Associated Press, he made small talk with the young officers in the Pentagon while his colleagues in the press corps went to lunch. Hersh’s interactions with lower-level officers prompted him to report on U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, including the My Lai massacre.
Not every reporter is like Hersh. In fact, he is somewhat of an anomaly. In Cover-Up, he remarks that his colleagues got paid “an awful lot of money for doing things like listening to the news conference and waiting an hour till the transcript’s typed up.” But if Pentagon reporters today can only rely on government press briefings for information, where they may seldom get satisfactory answers from government officials from either party, many of them may as well serve as stenographers of the state.
