Pete Hegseth‘s Defense Department has threatened to revoke press credentials of news organization that do not agree to restrictive new coverage rules — and says it may bar journalists who don’t agree to abide by the rules from physical access to the Pentagon’s grounds. But more than three dozen news orgs have said they are refusing to sign on to the requirements.
On Tuesday, in a joint statement five major TV news outlets — ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News — said they were not agreeing to the new rules. The Pentagon has told reporters they must sign an agreement for the new rules by Tuesday or turn in their press passes by Wednesday.
According to the Defense Department’s press office, which outlined the new rules last month, reporters covering the Pentagon must sign a pledge not to obtain or use unauthorized material (even if the information is unclassified). If they do not, they will potentially be barred from the Pentagon.
“Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues,” the networks said in the statement. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. 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 five networks join a number of other news orgs that have already said they won’t agree to the new rules being imposed by Hegseth, a former Fox News host. Those include the New York Times, AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, NewsNation and the Hill, along with conservative-leaning outlets like Newsmax and the Washington Examiner.
At press time, only one outlet has said it plans to sign on to the new rules announced by the Pentagon, which the Trump administration now calls the “U.S. Department of War”: pro-Trump network One America News Network (OANN).
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Here’s the current full list of news outlets that have refused to sign the Pentagon’s new rules, as compiled by the Washington Post:
ABC News AL-Monitor Associated Press The Atlantic Aviation Week Axios Bloomberg News Breaking Defense C4ISRNET CBS News CNN Defense Daily Defense News Defense One The Economist Federal Times The Financial Times Fox News The Guardian The Hill HuffPost Military Times MSNBC NBC News The New York Times Newsmax NewsNation NPR PBS NewsHour Politico RealClearPolitics Reuters Task & Purpose The Wall Street Journal The Washington Examiner The Washington Post The Washington Times WTOP
I’m going to let this post stay up even though it is VERY close to Orphan Grinding Machine territory, if only because it’s a positive story set in a generally negative timeline.
See, with this comm, I totally get that this story is right on the edge, and would not really be too miffed if it got removed from here, I posted it here because a commenter in World News from lemmy.world said I should.
Ironically, that post/thread, in World News on lemmy.world has since been locked and removed.
Because apparently this is ‘US Internal News’ and doesn’t qualify as potentially having significant impacts on, ramifications to the entire world.
Not like the US Military is the largest in the world with the most bases all around the world or anything like that, not like the press being able to have any idea what they are doing outside of official governement press releases/propoganda could be relevant to anyone outside the US, I guess.
lol I was making the exact same decision you did. I’d love a headline that frames this as “Fox News joins the Press Freedom Movement” as OP does but we’ll have to settle for this.