A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets violate the First Amendment and issued an order tossing parts of the Defense Department’s policy, handing a victory to The New York Times, which filed suit in December over the restrictions.
Judge Paul
Friedman, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also ordered the
Pentagon to restore the press passes of seven journalists for The Times. They
had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which
empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their
press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed
threatened national security.
In his
40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded
reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or
spoon-fed by department leadership.”
Siding
with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon
had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also
violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said,
writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their
jobs without losing their credentials.”
The ruling was a defeat for the Trump administration, which has been engaged in a multifaceted pressure campaign against the news media. ABC News and CBS News’s parent company agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements to resolve suits that President Trump brought against the networks. The ABC late-night star Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air last year after Mr. Trump’s top communications regulator assailed his program and suggested that he might take regulatory action against the broadcaster.
Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former host on Fox News, has continued Mr. Trump’s
adversarial stance toward the news media. He proposed denying access to
Pentagon to a reporter from NBC News, then removed several news organizations
from their on-site workstations. Months later, he curtailed the unescorted
roaming privileges of journalists within the complex.
Friday’s
ruling against the Pentagon followed a similarly stark decision this month from
a federal judge to restore
the operations of Voice of America, a government-funded news organization
that Mr. Trump had ordered shuttered a year ago in an executive order.
A
spokesman for The Times said Judge Friedman’s ruling “reaffirms the right of
The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the
public’s behalf,” adding that “Americans deserve visibility into how their
government is being run, and the actions the military is taking in their name
and with their tax dollars.”
Sean
Parnell, the chief spokesman at the Pentagon, said in an X post, “We disagree with the decision and are
pursuing an immediate appeal.”
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