(AFP) – The New York Times on Thursday filed a lawsuit challenging the Pentagon’s new restrictive media policy, saying it was unconstitutional and asking a court to block its implementation. US and international news outlets including AFP, AP, Fox News, and the Times declined to sign the new policy in mid-October, meaning they were stripped of their Pentagon credentials.
The Pentagon policy “in violation of the First Amendment seeks 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,” according to the Times’ complaint. “If and when they do and then publish anything that has not been approved by Pentagon officials, the policy permits those officials to, at any time and without any standards to guide their decisions, immediately suspend and ultimately revoke those journalists’ badges,” it says.
The new policy is the latest in a series of moves aimed at restricting journalists’ access to information from the Pentagon, the nation’s single largest employer with a budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The Defense Department announced earlier this year that eight media organizations, including the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, and NPR, had to vacate their dedicated office spaces in the Pentagon, alleging that there was a need to create room for other — predominantly conservative — outlets.
It also required journalists to be accompanied by official escorts if they go outside a limited number of areas in the Pentagon — another new restriction on the press — and has only held a limited number of briefings for journalists this year. The journalists who refused to sign the media policy have been replaced by media personalities friendly to the Trump administration, who were invited to attend the Pentagon press secretary’s first on-camera briefing this week while outlets that had their credentials stripped were barred from the event.
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