US judge compels Department of Defense to restore journalist access to Pentagon News
"DoD photo by Master Sgt. Ken Hammond, U.S. Air Force.", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
US judge compels Department of Defense to restore journalist access to Pentagon

A US federal district judge on Thursday granted a motion to compel the Department of Defense to restore access to the Pentagon for reporters.

Judge Friedman yesterday held that the defendants were still not in compliance with a March court order:

[T]he Department [cannot] take steps to circumvent the Court’s injunction and expect the Court to turn a blind eye. But that is exactly what the defendants have done by closing the Correspondents’ Corridor and imposing an escort requirement. The Court’s Order requires the Department to restore the plaintiffs’ access to the Pentagon. Rather than comply with that Order, the Department has cut off all PFAC holders’ meaningful access to the Pentagon.

In essence, according to the court, the Department of Defense “has invoked slightly different language to achieve that same unconstitutional result.” The judge issued an order enjoining the government from enforcing the new provisions against qualified journalists.

Dozens of journalists walked out of the Pentagon in October and turned in their badges, refusing to comply with the changes. In December, the New York Times and one of its reporters sued the Department of Defense, alleging that the rules violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution. Specifically, the plaintiffs argued that the policy was viewpoint-based, which is a type of classification that is highly disfavored and highly suspect under First Amendment jurisprudence.

Furthermore, the plaintiffs argued that requiring them to get government approval before reporting specific information is a prior restraint on speech that unconstitutionally and “impermissibly chills speech” by discouraging the robust debate that the First Amendment is intended to protect.

Just last month, Judge Paul Friedman agreed. He ordered that the Department of Defense reinstate certain journalists’ credentials and also vacated certain provisions of the policy that he declared to be unconstitutional. The federal government subsequently attempted to circumvent this order by implementing a revised policy that would expel all reporters from the Pentagon unless they were accompanied by escorts.

The order comes as a part of a long battle between journalists and the federal government over the new rules, which, in part, require all reporters to agree to forfeit their access to the Pentagon for reporting unapproved information.

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