NY Times Sues Pentagon Over Absurd Press Policy As Pentagon Investigation Finds Pete Hegseth’s Signal Chat Risked Lives
In September, the Trump administration’s Pentagon unveiled a new policy that reporters cannot obtain or solicit any information unless it is pre-approved by the Department of Defense, or, as the department’s head, Pete Hegseth, affectionately calls it, the Department of War. (To be fair, in this instance, the department is engaging in a war on the free press.)
In October, we reported that virtually every mainstream media outlet — including right-wing institutions of MAGA fiction like Newsmax and Fox News — responded to the Pentagon’s new media requirement with a resounding no. Again, pretty much all of them. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Reuters, the Guardian, the Washington Times, and the aforementioned right-wing networks, where so-called journalists get paid to sniff President Donald Trump’s butt through his diaper for at least hour-long segments — all of these outlets decided they’d rather be barred from the Pentagon than be subjected to a paranoid government’s attempt at micromanaging the media.
Well, the New York Times has now taken things a step further and filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon over its absurd policy, which is transparently a ploy to control the media narrative around the goings on in the federal government.
From NBC News:
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Washington, alleges that the 21-page agreement that Pentagon reporters were told to sign in October was unlawful and unconstitutional. Many reporters, including six at The New York Times, handed in their Pentagon access badges in protest over the policy.
The Defense Department’s new policy “seeks to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that the public beyond official pronouncements,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit states it will “vigorously defend against the violation of these rights, just as we have long done throughout administrations opposed to scrutiny and accountability.”
“The policy is an attempt to exert control over reporting the government dislikes, in violation of a free press’s right to seek information under their First and Fifth Amendment rights protected by the Constitution,” a spokesperson for The New York Times said in a statement.
The lawsuit names the Department of Defense, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell as defendants. The action is brought by the New York Times Company and its defense reporter.
Of course, the Pentagon has claimed the policy is not an attempt to target any particular news outlet, but is “preventing leaks that damage operational security and national security. It’s common sense.” But — come on, now — no one should take that narrative seriously from a federal government that has turned “fake news” into a slogan to be used in combating literally every negative report about Trump and his thoroughly ghettoized White House. Trump berates reporters, calling them “stupid” just for asking perfectly reasonable and relevant questions that he’d rather not answer, as does White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. All this administration does is lie and call media outlets liars for saying so. Hell, this administration has banned journalists and entire media outlets from the White House press pool just for refusing to entertain Trump’s ideological nonsense and/or refusing to let his lies go unchallenged.
In fact, let’s bring this back to Hegseth.
Remember when Trump’s reverse-DEI hire shared military plans to attack Houthi rebel sites in Yemen with his wife and several work colleagues on separate Signal chats? Well, an internal Pentagon investigation conducted by the Defense Department Inspector General concluded that the information had initially been classified, and that Hegseth’s decision to relay the details of a pending strike in a commercial messaging app risked putting troops in danger.
From NBC:
It found that the information Hegseth shared had been marked “secret” and could have imperiled American troops had it been intercepted by a foreign adversary, the two people who have read the report said. The evaluation by the Defense Department Inspector General also concluded that Hegseth violated military regulations by using his personal phone for official business, according to those people.
However, ABC News reported that “sources say also included in the report was an acknowledgement that even though sharing such sensitive information was potentially risky, the defense secretary is granted certain declassification powers under the law,” and that “the IG ultimately determined that while Hegseth violated his own agency’s protocols, he didn’t break the law.” And so, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, declared “TOTAL exoneration” for Hegseth, completely ignoring every other detail regarding the investigation.
“The Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along — no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved, and the case is closed,” Parnell said in a statement.
Now, if news outlets had to present their stories on this matter to the Pentagon before publishing them, which version of the story would you suspect would be the only version it would approve?
Look, if the Pentagon’s press policy were about national security or accurate reporting, it wouldn’t have responded to the mass exodus of accredited news outlets by replacing them with right-wing podcasters, influencers, and Bargain Basement “news” outlets that no one takes seriously unless they’re graduates of the prestigious journalistic institution of YouTube University for Scholarly Trust-Me-Bros.
From our report:
According to the Washington Post, which obtained a draft of the announcement made by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, the outlets that agreed to the Defense Department’s terms, earning their way into the no-news-but-MAGA-fied-fake-news echo chamber, include The Gateway Pundit, the Post Millennial, Human Events, the National Pulse, Turning Point USA’s media brand, Frontlines, influencer Tim Pool’s Timcast, a Substack-based newsletter called Washington Reporter, and Lindell TV, started by Trump ally Mike Lindell, the idiot MyPillow CEO who, in June, was found liable in a defamation lawsuit accusing him of spreading President Donald Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies. According to The Guardian, the Gateway Pundit also recently settled a defamation suit after promoting Trump’s “big lie.”
Yeah — perhaps all the outlets that refused to comply with the Pentagon’s demands should follow the Times in using the civil courts to protect the free press from this corrupt and janky administration of woefully underqualified propagandists. If journalists won’t stand up for themselves, who will?
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