The Pentagon released new restrictions for journalists covering the Department of Defense this week, requiring them to sign a pledge not to gather or report on information that has not been authorized for release—even if it is unclassified. Those who do not obey the new rules, the Pentagon said, risk having their press credentials revoked.
“The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do. The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules — or go home,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X Friday evening.
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The Department of Defense said in a 17-page memo circulated on Friday that, in addition to the new reporting rules, the around 90 reporters credentialed to cover the Pentagon will now be restricted from several floors of the building unless they have a government escort, which heavily restricts the movement of journalists who, for the most part, were previously able to walk the halls.
Longtime Pentagon press corps members and press freedom groups roundly condemned the move, characterizing it as an alarming shift away from decades of precedent set by previous administrations.
“It’s 100% an intimidation tactic. It’s 100% an attempt to kill transparency and funnel all public information through the government, which goes against every constitutional principle of free speech you can imagine,” Kevin Baron, the former vice president of the Pentagon Press Association who covered the Pentagon as a reporter for 15 years, told TIME.
Baron noted that Pentagon reporters have for decades had the ability to walk freely not just in the DoD headquarters, but also in the press offices for every service branch, from the Navy to the Army. The restrictions, Baron said, prevent reporters from doing their job entirely. In his fifteen years as a beat reporter at the Pentagon, Baron said it was incredibly rare for him to have to sign “anything,” and the only times he did were times in which his reporting affected the safety of those traveling into conflict zones.
Seth Stern of the Free Press Foundation said that the mandate goes against decades of legal precedent of journalists lawfully obtaining and publishing government secrets. He called the move “fundamentally un-American.”
“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations,” Stern said. “[T]he government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”
Stern said that he hoped that journalists would not capitulate to the Pentagon’s new rules, and would forgo their access if they needed to.
“Agreeing not to look where the government doesn’t want you to look and, by extension, not to print what it doesn’t want you to print, is propaganda, not journalism,” Stern said.
The National Press Club president, Mike Balsamo, called the move a “direct assault on independent journalism.”
“If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting,” Balsamo said in a statement. “It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”
The move comes at a time when the treatment of the press by the U.S. military and the government at large is under high scrutiny.
The new rules follow previous restrictions on movement Hegseth placed on journalists in May after he had been hit by several high-profile media leaks in his first few months in office, one of the most serious of which came after the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic detailed his experience of being accidentally placed in a Signal group chat with national-security leaders that included plans about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Hegseth has repeatedly denied this reporting.
The Pentagon in particular has had a tense, if not antagonistic, relationship with the press. In February, Hegseth instituted a new “annual media rotation program,” which essentially kicked out several news organizations from their Pentagon offices, including NBC News, the New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR), to rotate in new, conservative outlets, including One American Network, Newsmax and Breitbart, as well as the more progressive HuffPost.
After the Trump Administration’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hegseth made headlines for continuously criticizing the Pentagon’s media corps, calling on them to focus on the details of the mission carried out by the U.S. military, rather than on leaked intelligence that argued that the damage made by the U.S. strikes was not as severe as desired.
The Pentagon’s attacks on the press come in conjunction with the Trump Administration’s efforts to limit coverage and access to journalists. President Donald Trump also sued multiple news organizations during his first nine months in office, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, over their coverage.
Just this week, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, threatened television stations with “fines or license revocation” if they continued distributing Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the comedian’s late-night show, over comments he made about the recently assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Soon after, ABC network decided to indefinitely suspend the show, a move that has prompted criticism from free speech advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it is just one move in Trump’s “unconstitutional plan to silence its critics and control what the American people watch and read.”
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