Imagine for a moment that the Defense Department’s new demand for a “pledge” from Pentagon reporters — a commitment not to publish even unclassified but sensitive information, except what press officers approve, under threat of losing their press passes — had existed during the botched evacuation of American personnel from Afghanistan four years ago.
Reporters would have been under pressure to cover that withdrawal, which President Trump regularly describes as the most disastrous moment in American military history, as the Pentagon would have wanted it depicted: a heroic airlift, amid chaos. The reporters who revealed the disastrous drone strike during the evacuation that killed 10 civilians, contradicting the Biden administration's initial insistence that it was a “righteous strike,” could have been in danger of losing their military press credentials.
Had they been in place at the time, the new rules, which were announced on Friday and are scheduled to come into effect over the next two weeks, might have also impeded reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war. The few dissents inside the U.S. government, questioning President George W. Bush’s confident assertion that Saddam Hussein was still seeking weapons of mass destruction, were certainly sensitive — and in some cases highly classified.
And in Vietnam, the reporters who leaped on and off helicopters, recording the day-to-day reality in a conflict that today seems hopelessly misbegotten, might have risked losing their access to the battlefield for reporting the obvious: What was happening on the ground didn’t remotely match with what optimistic American military leadership was describing at briefings known as the “Five O’Clock Follies.”
The key to American national security reporting, back to the days when Jefferson sent the Navy to fight the Barbary pirates, has been to compare the government’s official account with evidence, documents and on-the-ground reporting. That was how journalists described to Americans the flubbed Bay of Pigs operation early in the Kennedy administration and the secret war in Cambodia.
In publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, The New York Times exposed how an official but unreleased account of the Vietnam War documented a systematic effort by the Johnson administration to mislead the public about the course of the conflict. The history was marked “Top Secret — Sensitive.” Its revelation helped change public perceptions of the war.
These days, in covering traditional conflicts like the one in Ukraine, or the new battlefields of space and cyberspace, or the “shadow war” of sabotage, journalists find it almost impossible to report without running into a wall of sensitivity, secrecy and classification. That even includes attacks that strike at ordinary Americans, such as the Chinese “Salt Typhoon” campaign that pierced deep into American telecommunications systems.
Getting to an approximation of the truth means dealing with a messy mix of unclassified, sensitive and, at times, classified data — some stamped “Top Secret” because national security is truly at stake, some because its revelation would be embarrassing.
The government and the press have tangled over the publication of secret information for decades, of course, most famously in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which led to a landmark court fight that reaffirmed press freedoms.
But the rules set out by the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seek to establish new constraints on journalists that news organizations consider unconstitutional and at odds with democratic norms.
To obtain or renew a Pentagon pass, a memo circulated on Friday declared, reporters must sign a commitment to publish only information “approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
Violators would lose their access to the Pentagon and all U.S. military facilities. Mr. Hegseth, writing on social media, said the move established that “the ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do.”
Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that the rules were “basic, common-sense guidelines to protect sensitive information.”
Reporters have begun receiving notifications that they must sign a form agreeing to the new rules, and that if they refuse, their passes could be revoked in less than two weeks. That would constrain their access to civilian and military officials in the building and at bases around the country and the world.
Mr. Hegseth, who discussed a planned military strike this year on a text chain with a group to which a journalist had accidentally been added, is hardly the first senior national security official to vow to bring the press under control. During the Civil War, two famed Union commanders, Philip Sheridan and William T. Sherman, detained reporters and court-martialed one for espionage. President Barack Obama opened more leak investigations than all of his modern predecessors, combined.
Coming amid a broader push by the administration to clamp down on criticism of Mr. Trump, the scope of Mr. Hegseth’s effort stunned news organizations, which are considering how best to keep the policy from coming into effect, including potential legal challenges.
Even a few Republicans in Congress have expressed reservations. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a former brigadier general in the Air Force, wrote on social media: “This is so dumb that I have a hard time believing it is true. We don’t want a bunch of Pravda newspapers only touting the Government’s official position.”
It is also reflective of an outdated view of how national security news gets reported in Washington.
While the Pentagon remains a critical source of information about the use of American power, it is hardly the only source. Commercial satellites offer remarkably detailed imagery of nuclear sites in Iran, and international inspectors collect critical intelligence on that country, much of it “sensitive” in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Intelligence agencies from many nations collect and exchange data on Ukraine. From the beginning of the conflict, the British have published significantly more detailed daily assessments of the action than the Pentagon has made public. Drone, cellphone and security camera imagery gives reporters a look at action on the front lines.
In its oversight role, Congress receives — and sometimes releases — information the Trump administration would like to keep secret. Senators complain that they, too, are being frozen out of information that was once routinely shared. They still have not received a full accounting of the evidence that the U.S. military is using to justify sinking boats coming out of Venezuela, even amid questions about whether some are not carrying drugs, as the administration asserts they are.
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a veteran and the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he thought the effort was aimed at making journalists “mere stenographers for the party in power or the Pentagon itself.”
The State Department and the White House have so far not sought to impose similar restrictions, though the White House banned The Associated Press earlier this year from participating in the press pools that get close-up access to the president because the news organization declined to switch to using “Gulf of America,” rather than “Gulf of Mexico.”
Even Mr. Trump has appeared dubious about the effectiveness of the Defense Department’s new policy, though he has done nothing to roll it back. A reporter asked him over the weekend, “Should the Pentagon be in charge of deciding what reporters can report on?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Mr. Trump said. “Listen, nothing stops reporters. You know that.”