When Pentagon officials pass by the briefing room in the coming days, they’re unlikely to encounter a reporter from the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, NPR or Newsmax. Such a glaring absence of media outlets would appear unprecedented, according to The Atlantic’s Nancy Youssef, who notes that journalists have worked in the building since it opened during the second World War.
“It’s a sad day,” Youssef told TheWrap on Tuesday morning from the Pentagon, as she, and other reporters, were cleaning out their desks ahead of a 2pm deadline for accepting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new press access rules. Given that news organizations have been nearly unanimous in declining to do so — pro-Trump outlet One America News being a notable exception — the weeks-long standoff is coming to a head, with journalists presumably out the door by Wednesday. And with them goes decades of institutional memory.
“The Pentagon beat is one where reporters generally stay on for long periods of time because it takes years to really have just a basic understanding of how the military works,” Youssef said. “Many of my colleagues here, I’ve known them for, in some cases, decades.”
What’s most unfortunate, she said, is the impact on press freedom. “We weren’t here for fun and games. We were here to do a job and a job that we really believed in and we’re passionate about and on behalf of informing the American people,” she said, adding: “We always knew what a great responsibility we had.”
Youssef’s publication, The Atlantic, is one of dozens of news organizations refusing to sign on to a press policy they say would restrict Constitutionally protected news gathering. “The requirements violate our First Amendment rights, and the rights of Americans who seek to know how taxpayer-funded military resources and personnel are being deployed,” editor-in-chief Jeff Goldberg said in a statement. “We will continue to cover matters of defense, war, and national security independently and fairly.”
Other newsroom leaders stressed the need to soldier on regardless of access. The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray said his newsroom “will continue to vigorously and fairly report on the policies and positions of the Pentagon and officials across the government,” while one of his military reporters posted simply, “We’re not signing this. Back to work.” It’s a mindset that recalls former Post chief Marty Baron’s mantra from the early days of Donald Trump’s first term: “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”
Even Hegseth’s former employer Fox News, declined to accept the Pentagon’s new requirements. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections,” read a statement from Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. “We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.”
The collective rejection of the Pentagon’s policy signals that media outlets are willing to fight back in a second Trump term, rather than fall in line. It hasn’t always appeared that way, as the parent companies of CBS News and ABC News, Paramount and Disney, respectively, settled multi-million-dollar lawsuits with Trump rather than mounting vigorous defenses of the First Amendment in court, and as media companies briefly removed late-night host Jimmy Kimmel from air amid pressure from FCC chair Brendan Carr. Some billionaire media owners and tech titans have looked more intent on currying favor with the administration than criticizing it.
There was less concerted pushback earlier this year when the White House banned the AP from the press pool and took over pool assignments, a role that had traditionally fallen to the White House Correspondents Association. Despite denunciations in media circles, reporters continued to travel with the president and pose questions in the Oval Office. In the case of the Pentagon access dispute, news outlets are drawing a line in the stand, and refusing, en masse, to cross it.
While Donald Trump engages with the media, including aboard Air Force One during his whirlwind Middle East trip this week, Hegseth rarely takes questions from the press corps. His leadership of the Pentagon has come under significant media scrutiny, with reports of infighting and isolation, and as his former top spokesman put it, “total chaos” inside the Pentagon.
One of Hegseth’s early moves at the Pentagon was to evict the New York Times, NBC, NPR and Politico from their dedicated workspaces, and replace the outlets with presumably more friendly outlets like the New York Post, Breitbart News and One America News, the latter appearing to be the only one willing to sign the access policy. His Defense Department then announced last month that news organizations risked losing press credentials if they published information without the government’s approval, a mandate that runs counter to traditional newsgathering and was met with swift opposition.
While the Pentagon clarified its guidelines last week, news outlets still balked at signing on to policy asserting that “soliciting or encouraging government employees to break the law falls outside the scope of protected newsgathering activities.”
There’s no law requiring that reporters be permitted to work inside the White House or the Pentagon, but journalist groups and administration officials have long hammered out arrangements that allow for reporting in the public interest alongside necessary security measures. Hegseth described Pentagon access on Monday as “a privilege, not a right.”
“It is a privilege to be able to talk to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to talk to the Secretary of Defense,” said Barbara Starr, who spent more than two decades covering the Pentagon for CNN. In an interview with TheWrap, Starr, who is currently a Senior Fellow at USC’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, made clear such conversations play out when officials “wish to stop and talk to reporters,” and that “nobody chases them down.”
Starr and other journalists rejected suggestions from Hegseth and officials that reporters are freely roaming through classified areas of the building; the Pentagon Press Association noted in a Monday statement that journalists already wear identification badges and access “has always been limited to unclassified, open spaces.” (Youssef mentioned she was wearing a badge as we spoke Tuesday.)
“The thing that makes the Defense Department so different is, military people, troops, raise their right hand and swear an oath to defend the Constitution, and that includes defending the First Amendment, and that includes defending freedom of the press,” Starr told me. “They are willing to lay down their lives for that. And it seems to me that part of Pete Hegseth’s oath of office also calls for defending freedom of the press. He doesn’t have to like it. He can disagree with it. But what he is doing this week is confiscating press passes and confiscating access to talking to the Defense Department.”
One Pentagon reporter told TheWrap they were concerned that, in moments of international crisis, it could be more difficult to get immediate, factual information from officials. “It has long been common to get information from a variety of nonpartisan sources” in the building, the reporter said. “No spin, no bullshit.” That includes the basics, like, say, which body of water an aircraft carrier is currently located or how many people were killed in an operation.
What’s also lost, said Youssef, is being able to watch “someone’s reaction to a major news event, feeling the tension in the building before a major military campaign or when something catastrophic happens,” along with the personal relationships that bring “nuance to the coverage on such a complex subject.”
The most consequential reporting on national security, such as deeply sourced investigative stories, generally isn’t “coming from random conversations in the hallway,” and will still be conducted in late-night phone calls and over Signal, the Pentagon reporter said. (Speaking of Signal, arguably the biggest military leak this year came by way of the secure platform when the Goldberg, of the Atlantic, was inadvertently added to a group chat with Hegseth and other top Trump officials.)
While some daily information may be harder to come by quickly, Starr suggested the move could “incentivize journalists to double down and dig for news even more, and it may well incentivize military personnel to find ways to communicate to the news media offline.”
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell on Monday accused news outlets of moving “the goal post” in refusing “to sign the policy because of a single issue: a line that says they ‘understand’ what our policies are.” Reporters, he said, are having “a full blown meltdown, crying victim online,” a characterization of the press corp that was echoed by his boss.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host prone to bashing the news media, wrote on X last month “the ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do,” and the need to “follow the rules—or go home.” And on Monday, as a flurry of news outlets announced they would not sign his department’s access pledge, the secretary responded with a series of hand-waving emojis, as if to say goodbye.
While Hegseth may not miss the press corps, the existence of reporters in the building, said Youssef, “was a message to the world that this military was so proud of what it was doing, and so confident in what it was doing, that it was willing to sort of open its doors to people like us to look in.”
