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Last month, the Department of Defense issued a memo to reporters imposing an unprecedented set of restrictions on covering the Pentagon and setting a deadline for members of the press to sign a pledge of compliance. Since then, news organizations have pushed back. The Pentagon Press Association, a group representing journalists who work in the building, has met with the press office, as did the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Some considered bringing a legal challenge to the policy. As the deadline for signatures neared—and no one, it seemed, was willing to submit to the terms—the Pentagon issued a revised version of the document. But reporters quickly determined that it wasn’t much of an improvement. “I think we’ll all be out of the building within weeks,” a member of the press corps told me.

Since Monday evening, when the revised policy was released, Pentagon reporters have been trying to make sense of what it means, exactly—and conferring with one another about their shared unease with the vagueness in the language, which they fear could leave them vulnerable not only to having their credentials revoked, but also to facing legal repercussions. Soliciting information from Pentagon personnel “would not be considered protected activity under the 1st Amendment,” according to the document, and members of the news media “who find themselves in possession of information” that appears to be unsanctioned—whether that’s “classified national security information” or “controlled unclassified” documents—are expected to “discuss those materials” with the Pentagon press office ahead of publication. But it’s unclear precisely what that would entail. “It’s standard practice by us and any other news organization to get a Pentagon statement when we’re going to report something,” an editor of a DC-based military publication told me. “We would always discuss, I guess, in one sense of the word. But it looks like they want to have a discussion like, ‘Okay, talk about it with us before you publish it so that we can tell you not to publish it.’” The deadline to sign on to the rules is next Tuesday.

Jane Kirtley, a professor of media law at the University of Minnesota who reviewed the policy, said that the updated guidelines are “clumsy, burdensome, and very likely to delay the release of information, even if we’re talking about unclassified information.” The policy would have a chilling effect, she noted, particularly on members of the military. “To be clear, these are the laws and regulations that apply to military members and DoW”—Department of War, the Trump administration’s new name for the Department of Defense—“civilian employees and contractors,” the memo states. “Members of the news media are not required to submit their writings to DoW for approval. However, they should understand that DoW personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.” As Kirtley observed, “There are multiple statements in here that say that the journalist does not need to obtain approval, that the burden of getting approval rests on the military personnel, and that even if a journalist gets classified information that they didn’t solicit, they have the constitutional right to publish it.”

And yet the Pentagon’s policy notes, too, that “an advertisement or social media post by an individual journalist or media outlet that directly targets DoW personnel to disclose non-public information without proper authorization would constitute a solicitation”—which could lead to a reporter’s press credentials being revoked.

Barbara Starr—a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, who spent more than two decades as CNN’s correspondent in the building—said that, “while the Pentagon has amended some of their original press policy, it’s still extremely concerning that everything is aimed at restricting the ability of the press to do its job under the First Amendment. Which, by the way, every member of the military swears an oath to protect.” Another reporter in the Pentagon press corps told me, “We were going to try and make a very good effort to get the document revised with an aim of it being something that most media organizations could sign.” But the updated version “was just really disappointing to read,” the reporter said. “The first set of rules, about reviewing our work, were admittedly rolled back, but in every other meaningful way, the document was actually an escalation of the restrictions.” 

Tara Copp, the Washington Post’s Pentagon correspondent, addressed Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, on X, saying that he “falsely suggested Pentagon reporters prowl the hallways accessing offices they are not allowed. We don’t. Even his boss, President Trump, allows reporters in to the Oval to ask him questions, and every defense secretary I’ve covered for more than a decade—both Republican and Democrat—has welcomed reporters to their office to talk. Hegseth is the exception.” 

Copp, a member of the Pentagon Press Association, also shared a statement from the group. “The Pentagon Press Association has been cautious with our public statements since the Defense Department first announced it would force reporters to make a choice: sign onto rules creating unprecedented restrictions on our ability to report the news, or end our historically-held access to the Pentagon,” the message went. “This caution was meant to support efforts to negotiate revisions to the document the Defense Department is requiring our members to sign to secure new credentials, in place of valid badges that are being taken away—the kind we’ve always worn. Unfortunately, those negotiations have not been as successful as we had hoped.”

The group also wrote that the policy “leaves open the threat of the Department of Defense revoking credentials for reporters who exercise their First Amendment rights by seeking information that hasn’t been pre-approved for formal release, even when the information is entirely unclassified.” It also intimidates DoD officials, they argued, “suggesting it’s criminal to speak without express permission.”

The statement raised concerns about the increasing isolation of reporters, noting plans to move them out of their dedicated workspaces in the Pentagon. In January, Hegseth upended the long-standing arrangement of the building’s press offices, ordering the removal of the New York Times, NPR, and Politico. Breitbart News and One America News Network were invited in. “A lot of the conversations are just talking about how we see our day-to-day lives,” a Pentagon reporter said, of the talk around the building this week. “What does our normal workday look like in a post-Pentagon world? Do we go back to our bureaus? Do we work from home? There are some reporters for smaller outlets who are interested in seeing if we can make a communal work situation happen. Even though we’re all in competition with each other, being in close proximity to our peers who are also experts in the military and bouncing ideas off each other—that sense of community is helpful.”

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, responded to criticism of the policy with a statement: “Beyond their displeasure at no longer being permitted to solicit criminal acts, the Pentagon Press Association’s objection to our updated media policy is that we require journalists to simply acknowledge they understand our rules protecting information critical to operational and national security.” Of the new guidelines, he said, “the only change is an overdue update to our credentialing process, which hasn’t been revised in years—if not decades—to align with modern security standards.” Parnell also noted that “even The New York Times has recognized the Department’s accommodating approach”—referring to an article that covered the news of the latest memo. But the Times story (headlined “Pentagon Relaxes Press Access Rules”) has been heavily criticized by reporters around the Pentagon, who believe it mischaracterized the revisions as representing greater leniency. (In a Fox News interview with Peter Doocy on Sunday, Hegseth said that “the Pentagon press corps can squeal all they want.”)

When the Pentagon shared its updated policy with reporters, the press office noted that it had engaged with members of the Pentagon Press Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press “to address press concerns contained in the previous version.” Even so, Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in statement, “We still have concerns with the updated language of the policy and expect that it will pose a significant impediment as journalists weigh with their employers whether or not to sign this revised version.” 

The policy has already put Pentagon reporters in a tough position. “Just this Sunday, when President Trump was speaking in Norfolk, he made this comment that ‘We conducted a strike yesterday in Venezuela,’” a member of the press corps told me. “That set off a flurry, because we were like, Hang on, the strike was on Friday. Does he mean Friday? Or was there another one on Saturday? And I did my reporter thing. I called officials in the Navy. I called officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense and eventually managed to get an off-the-record Hey, no, I think he misspoke. It is becoming increasingly difficult to even get on-the-record statements along those lines of No, no, this is just not factually correct.”

“You know, I had accepted it,” another Pentagon reporter told me. “I mean, it’s infuriating and upsetting. At the end of the day, it’s just going to make our jobs harder. But we’re not going to stop doing our jobs. We’re just going to have to keep finding new ways to do it.”

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