Trump's New Restrictions on Pentagon Reporters 'Should Alarm Every American'

Journalists and defenders of press freedom are expressing alarm and condemnation after the Pentagon, under the command of President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, announced new restrictions on reporters that include pre-approval of stories that include even unclassified material and a new pledge to not publish any material without permissions from government officials.

The New York Times, among the first to report on a 17-page memo detailing the new rules, noted how the "move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public." The National Press Club (NPC) was quick to rebuke the restrictions as an assault on the public's right to know and fundamental journalistic freedoms.

“The Pentagon is now demanding that journalists sign a pledge not to obtain or report any information—even if unclassified—unless it has been expressly authorized by the government," said Mike Balsamo, president of the NPC, in a statement. "This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military."

Balsamo continued:

For generations, Pentagon reporters have provided the public with vital information about how wars are fought, how defense dollars are spent, and how decisions are made that put American lives at risk. That work has only been possible because reporters could seek out facts without needing government permission.

If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.

Independent reporting on the military is essential to democracy. It is what allows citizens to hold leaders accountable and ensures that decisions of war and peace are made in the light of day. This pledge undermines that principle, and the National Press Club calls on the Pentagon to rescind it immediately.

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, explained to the Times that the government is prohibited by law putting from demanding journalists surrender their right to investigate the government in exchange for access or credentials.

“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations,” Stern said. “The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”

In comments to the Washington Post, Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, called the new policy part of “the Trump administration’s broader assault on free speech and press freedom.”

Any journalist, she added, "who publishes only what the government ‘authorizes’ is doing something other than reporting."

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton University, put it this way: "In Trump’s Pentagon, journalists who venture beyond reporting official propaganda now risk having their credentials revoked."

Individual journalists, including veteran reporters who have covered the Pentagon for years or decades, also chimed in.

Konstantin Toropin, the Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press, expressed alarm and dismay at the new restrictions.

"The Pentagon, which has claimed to [have] aspirations of being the most transparent in history, is once again cracking down on basic press access," Toropin said in a social media post. "Denying access to the Pentagon makes covering our military, our troops, and our actions abroad harder. Full stop."

Toropin said the rule forbidding the unapproved release of unclassified material, sometimes marked with the acronym "CUI," is "an incredibly broad and ill-defined rule that could be easily abused."

As his colleague Brian Everstine, the Pentagon editor at Aviation Week, noted:

At a time when Trump is being accused of severe abuses of power, including a series of attacks on alleged illegal drug runners in the Caribbean Sea, which international law experts have condemned as "extrajudicial executions," further restrictions on the ability of journalists to report on the internal workings of the president's military operations are seen as particularly dangerous.

Barbara Starr, who worked as CNN's chief Pentagon correspondent for many years who is now a senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication, Leadership and Policy, told ABC News that the entire effort "is extremely troubling because it's being done in an era of unprecedented public hostility from the secretary of defense to the news media."