WASHINGTON \u2014 The New York Times filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Pentagon over restrictions on media coverage implemented by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, alleging the new policy violates the constitutional rights of the outlet’s journalists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
The New York Times filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Pentagon over restrictions on press implemented by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, alleging the new policy violates the constitutional rights of the outlet’s journalists
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Filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the suit argues that Defense officials are seeking to \u201cfundamentally restrict coverage\u201d by limiting the information journalists can obtain and publish without risking the revocation of their press badges and by blocking access to the Pentagon if reporters decline to abide by the constraints
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Julian E. Barnes, a Times national security reporter and one of six of the paper\u2019s journalists who turned in their Pentagon press passes rather than sign the policy, was listed as a plaintiff
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\u201cWe are aware of the New York Times lawsuit and look forward to addressing these arguments in court,\u201d chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote in a statement shared with Spectrum News
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The news organization asked the federal court to find the policy unlawful and to reinstate its journalists’ press passes<\/p>\n
Filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the suit argues that Defense Department officials are seeking to \u201cfundamentally restrict coverage\u201d by limiting the information journalists can obtain and publish without risking the revocation of their press badges and by blocking access to the Pentagon if reporters decline to agree to the constraints.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe policy, in violation of the First Amendment, seeks to restrict journalists\u2019 ability to do what journalists have always done\u2014ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements,\u201d the Times argued in the filing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Julian E. Barnes, a Times national security reporter and one of six of the paper\u2019s journalists who turned in their Pentagon press passes rather than sign the policy, was listed as a plaintiff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hegseth,\u00a0chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell and the Defense Department, also called the Department of War, were named as defendants in the suit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are aware of the New York Times lawsuit and look forward to addressing these arguments in court,\u201d Parnell wrote in a statement shared with Spectrum News.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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In the filing, the news organization asked the federal court to find the policy unconstitutional and to reinstate the press badges \u2014 known as Pentagon Facility Alternate Credentials, or PFACs \u2014 previously issued to the Times\u2019 reporters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The complaint argues that the policy\u2019s \u201cincurably vague language and lack of standards\u201d allows the Pentagon to determine what constitutes a violation.<\/p>\n
The Times also specifically cites a section in the 21-page form \u2014 which the outlet included as an exhibit in its filings \u2014 as targeting \u201clawful, routine newsgathering techniques\u201d among its grounds for sanctions on reporters. The wording of the form states that \u201can advertisement or social media post\u201d that solicits \u201cnon-public information without proper authorization\u201d from Defense Department officials could lead to a journalist\u2019s credentials being revoked.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Times contended that the Pentagon imposed \u201cincreasingly stringent and unprecedented restrictions\u201d on members of the press after Hegseth took office and cited reporting by Jeffrey Goldberg, an editor at The Atlantic who was inadvertently added to a group chat on the messaging platform Signal in March<\/a>, as an inflection point. In the Signal chat, the defense secretary shared \u201csensitive, nonpublic\u201d details about a military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen using a personal phone, risking potential harm to U.S. personnel and their mission, the Pentagon’s inspector general\u00a0said in its report on the incident released Thursday<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Times\u2019 complaint also noted that the Pentagon has welcomed what Parnell called<\/a> the \u201cnext generation\u201d of press, who have signed the document and the Times contends are \u201cstrongly supportive of the Trump administration and whose viewpoints the Department favors.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTheir reach and impact collectively are far more effective and balanced than the self-righteous media who chose to self-deport from the Pentagon,\u201d Parnell said of some 60 media members who agreed to\u00a0the Pentagon\u2019s policy<\/a>\u00a0in October.\u00a0<\/p>\n Most mainstream media outlets\u00a0declined to sign<\/a> the policy when it was announced earlier this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Times reported<\/a> that there had been discussions about other news organizations signing on as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, but the paper ultimately decided to proceed alone in its legal challenge to the Pentagon\u2019s policy.<\/p>\n Separately, The Associated Press sued the Trump administration<\/a> earlier this year after federal officials blocked its journalists from events reportedly in retaliation for<\/a> the wire service not referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name President Donald Trump gave it, the Gulf of America.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The New York Times filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Pentagon over restrictions on media coverage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[105,117,106,25,32628,9,11,10,12,110,87,27],"class_list":["post-61084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-all-markets-rank-everywhere","tag-app-for-your-consideration","tag-app-national-politics","tag-app-top-stories","tag-christina-santucci","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-news","tag-nnt","tag-politics","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}