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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demand that members of the Pentagon press corps sign on to restrictive reporting guidelines has prompted a mass exodus. Nearly all the journalists who had desks in the Pentagon pressroom have declined to sign, and left the building in a joint protest on Wednesday afternoon. 

“It’s like college move-out day,” a reporter from an independent outlet that covers the military told CJR. Some reporters “have been sitting there for twenty years. It’s pretty depressing.” 

Griff Witte, a managing editor at The Atlantic, vowed that the magazine’s correspondents will “continue to report in every way they can to try to explain to the American people how their taxpayer dollars are being spent and what’s being done with American military might.” 

“I think the Pentagon knows where we stand,” said Witte, whose employer declined to sign the new policy. “You’ve seen media organizations of every character, and every single one of them down the line, nearly, have spoken very loudly, very clearly, and said these restrictions are not acceptable. I think that sends a very clear message about just how seriously we take our First Amendment rights and how seriously we take our responsibility to report accurately and truthfully.”

A joint statement issued Tuesday by NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News said the new policy is “without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.”

“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 addition to Fox, right-leaning outlets like the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal refused to sign the pledge. Newsmax claimed that “the requirements are unnecessary and onerous.” So far, the only outlet known to have signed is One America News Network. OANN was one of the organizations that entered the Pentagon press corps in February after Hegseth “reshuffled” workspaces inside the building and removed New York Times and NBC reporters, the first of many steps aimed at blocking journalistic scrutiny. (In May, reporters were told they had to be escorted by Pentagon personnel in more parts of the building, including when visiting the public affairs offices of various military services.) OANN’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Breitbart, which received a seat in the pressroom alongside OANN.

The path to Wednesday’s evictions began on September 18, when the Department of War, as Hegseth, a former Fox News reporter, has started calling it, issued a memo requiring journalists to submit their reporting to the Pentagon Press Office before publication. That directive was at odds with decades of practice and key legal precedents, including the 1971 Supreme Court ruling that rejected prior restraint and enabled the continued publication of the Pentagon Papers. “Any time you are required to submit something for a review by a governmental entity, that’s a prior restraint,” Jane Kirtley, a professor of media law at the University of Minnesota, said.

The Pentagon Press Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press engaged in extensive talks with the Pentagon Press Office, which led to revisions. Under an updated policy issued October 6, DoD personnel, not reporters, would be required to get approval before sharing information, in line with long-standing military practice. While the New York Times headlined its story about the revised policy “Pentagon Relaxes Press Access Rules,” reporters continued to describe the guidelines as “unsignable.” 

The revised policy emphasizes that military and civilian Pentagon employees can face “severe consequences,” under both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and US law, for sharing such information without permission, and notes that any “solicitation of DoW personnel to commit criminal acts would not be considered protected activity under the First Amendment.” It goes on to say that “solicitation” might include “direct communications with specific DoW personnel or general appeals…encouraging DoW employees to share non-public DoW information.” At a time when social media callouts and requests for tips are standard reporting tools, the policy cites “an advertisement or social media post by an individual journalist or media outlet that directly targets DoW personnel to disclose non-public information” as an example of solicitation.

“The idea that it is somehow improper for journalists to seek out information from the agency that they’re covering” is “very problematic,” Kirtley said. “If you’re going to ask a source for material, then it’s on that source to make a judgment about whether they’re allowed to distribute it or not.” Yet according to the guidelines, “if you even ask for it, that might be an indication later on down the line that you’re not acting in accordance with protocols, and you might lose your press pass, which would be retaliation for what I would consider to be protected speech.”

Legal experts said media outlets might be able to challenge the new rules in court. The Associated Press sued several White House officials in February, claiming they violated the First Amendment when they restricted AP reporters’ access after the agency refused to call the Gulf of Mexico by the administration’s preferred name, the “Gulf of America.” The AP won, but an appeals court issued a stay, so the ruling is on hold. 

“What happened in that case, which I think is really important here, is that once the government opens its doors to some kind of journalistic access, then it’s in effect creating a form of public forum, even if that’s limited in some way,” said Carey Shenkman, a First Amendment lawyer and coauthor of A Century of Repression, a recent book about the long history of the Espionage Act being wielded against the press. “And what the First Amendment offers as a protection is that once a government invites the press or the public in, they then can’t discriminate and start to exclude either the press or individuals based on their political viewpoints, their expressive conduct, or their reporting.”

The new policy asserts that the Pentagon is “committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust,” and Hegseth has claimed that its goal is to ensure that the Pentagon has the “same rules as every US military installation.” But his jubilation at the departures has been clear on X, where he has shared statements from the Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic with a waving emoji, along with an AI-generated image of a crying baby wearing an Atlantic T-shirt. In March, Hegseth was widely criticized after he shared details of a classified US air strike in Yemen with members of a Signal chat to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor in chief, had been added accidentally.

While many in the Pentagon press corps are mourning the change, some veteran reporters see a silver lining. James Risen, a Pulitzer-winning national security reporter, described Hegseth’s policy as “part of a larger dystopian nightmare that’s going on in America,” but said it could end up benefiting the public. “I covered the CIA for a long time, and the CIA does not give reporters press passes,” Risen said. “And in a way, I think it forced reporters who cover the CIA to be more adversarial. And I think that’s been a long-standing problem with the coverage of the military. The reporters get so close to specific generals or military units that they begin to kind of carry water for them.”

The reporter for the independent outlet that covers the military, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from Hegseth’s Pentagon, pushed back on that notion. “I’ve never pulled punches or avoided writing something because I was worried about upsetting a source,” the reporter said. “That’s not how I operate. It’s not how the Pentagon press corps operates.”

Risen acknowledged that reporting from outside the building may be more challenging. “It’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to require much more in-depth reporting. And it’s going to require a lot of reporters willing to provide assurances of confidentiality in ways that they haven’t had to do before,” he said. “If I was an editor or a reporter, I would try to look at it as an opportunity to be more adversarial and to prove to the Pentagon that what they are doing is going to lead to even tougher coverage. You’ve got to write tough stories to convince people to take you seriously. It’s an opportunity for the Pentagon press corps to actually show some independence.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the date when certain restrictions were imposed on the movement of journalists within the Pentagon.

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