Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the “fake news” media on Wednesday of focusing on wartime tragedies to make President Donald Trump “look bad,” kicking off a Pentagon briefing on U.S. military operations against Iran with a fresh swipe at the press.
Hegseth mostly took questions from the new Pentagon press corps, consisting largely of conservative outlets like One America News and Lindell TV, but he also called on a reporter from BBC News, one of dozens of outlets that rejected the Pentagon’s new press policy in October. This week marked the first time in more than four months that news organizations that gave up their badges — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters and The Atlantic — were granted access to Pentagon briefings.
Whether mainstream reporters can once again obtain badges to work out of the Pentagon on a sustained basis might depend on what happens Friday in a Washington D.C. courtroom. If the Times persuades the court that the Defense Department’s restrictions are unconstitutional, its reporters — and potentially others down the line — could have their credentials restored and return to the Pentagon, as had been the case for decades.
The courtroom test comes at a critical moment for the public to get timely, accurate information on the widening conflict in the Middle East, which has already claimed the lives of six U.S. service members in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait and forced the State Department to urge Americans to leave 14 countries in the region. Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a press briefing on Monday at the Pentagon; Caine joined the secretary again Wednesday.
“It’s a positive that the Pentagon has started briefing now, after hiding from the press so frequently last year,” one Pentagon reporter told TheWrap. “We’ll see how long that holds.”
“What’s less obvious is how many basic questions are still going unanswered and how many defense officials have been cut out of the information loop,” the reporter added. “This war could stretch for weeks or longer, and bumper sticker sayings are only going to go so far.”
The most in-depth and consequential reporting on the military doesn’t happen when passing quickly through Pentagon hallways, but tends to result from speaking to a variety of confidential sources. For instance, six Times reporters produced a comprehensive look inside Trump’s decision to go to war on Monday based on accounts of sources spanning the White House, Congress, diplomatic circles, defense and intelligence agencies.
But reporters stressed to TheWrap in October, as they packed up boxes with their belongings, that there is great value in working inside the Pentagon during times of international crisis in order to get reliable information that isn’t filtered through a partisan lens.
A spokesperson for the War Department — as the Trump administration now refers to it — told TheWrap that they “will consider press access on a case-by-case basis” for reporters without credentials, while noting that “credentialed media will always have access to DOW press briefings.”
The Times’ case
In December, the Times, along with its reporter, Julian E. Barnes, sued the Department of Defense (aka Department of War), Hegseth and chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, accusing the department of violating the First Amendment by seeking “to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”
The Pentagon’s new rules proposed that reporters not seek information from officials who are unauthorized to disclose it. Doing so could result in reporters being deemed a security or safety risk and losing their credentials. The rules also included additional restrictions on access.
News outlets were particularly concerned with the suggestion that asking sources for information could be considered “soliciting” them to “break the law” — and therefore not protected activity under the First Amendment. Beyond constraining reporting, they feared such framing could effectively criminalize routine newsgathering. So journalists surrendered their badges, known as PFACs (Pentagon Facility Alternate Credentials) and exited the building en masse.
“This case is a symptom of what is an explicit war against First Amendment values that the Trump administration has been waging,” attorney Theodore J. Boutrous, a partner in the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which has been retained by the Times, told TheWrap.
Boutrous successfully defended former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta during Trump’s first term, when the White House revoked his press credential, as well as then-Playboy reporter Brian Karem, when his White House credential was suspended. The Times argues in its suit the Pentagon’s new policy violates Fifth Amendment due process rights, and cited the Karem case as precedent. (A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to reinstate Karem’s credentials, a ruling held up on appeal.)
The Times suit alleges that with the new policy, “Pentagon officials have dealt to themselves the power to suspend and eventually revoke journalists’ [badges] for publishing stories that Pentagon leadership may perceive as unfavorable or unflattering, in direct contravention of Supreme Court precedent.”
The Times buttressed its claim of viewpoint discrimination by pointing to criticism of the news media by Parnell, who took aim at “activists who masquerade as journalists in the mainstream media,” and press secretary Kinsley Wilson, who dubbed journalists “propagandists” who “stopped telling the truth” as she welcomed the new Pentagon press corps in December, a group that included right-wing media figures like Laura Loomer, James O’Keefe and Jack Posobiec.
In a motion filed last week, the Defense Department’s attorneys rejected the Times’ framing of what constitutes routine newsgathering, and stated that “actively soliciting Department personnel to commit criminal acts — acts for which those personnel face prosecution under identified federal statutes — may be considered in determining whether the [badge]-holder poses a security risk.”
“It should not be controversial to ask journalists who are granted the privilege of unescorted access to the headquarters of the American military to acknowledge that they understand the law,” the department argued. “That is not a restriction on protected speech; it is a commonsense security measure that falls squarely within the category of unprotected speech.”
With the department citing safety and security behind its rationale for instituting the new policy, the Times pointed out that “Hegseth and other top officials inadvertently disclosed details regarding imminent U.S. airstrikes in Yemen” to Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, igniting last year’s Signalgate scandal. Meanwhile, the Times’ suit states, the department “has sought to impose increasingly stringent and unprecedented restrictions on journalists covering the Department and its leadership.”
The department declined to comment on ongoing litigation.
As for claims of viewpoint discrimination, the department rejected the Times’ “narrative” that the new policy “was designed to purge disfavored journalists and replace them with ideologically aligned media.”
The department noted that Fox News — “Secretary Hegseth’s former employer” — along with right-leaning outlets such as Newsmax, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller refused to sign the agreement and relinquished their badges.
One thing both sides have agreed on is for the proceedings to move quickly. They are skipping discovery, with a hearing scheduled for Friday in front of Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman.
How Friedman decides could have major ramifications for the Pentagon press corps, from declaring the policy unconstitutional and paving the way for the Times, and potentially other outlets, to regain their credentials, to upholding the administration’s policy.
After a parade of mainstream journalists exited the Pentagon last fall, the judge’s ruling could determine if this week — with the “old” and “new” Pentagon press corps in the same room — is an anomaly or the new normal.
