March 21, 2026
For decades, reporters from major news organizations covered the United States military from inside the Pentagon using press credentials called Pentagon Facilities Alternate Credentials, or PFACs. These credentials gave journalists daily, unescorted access to briefings, press conferences, and the kind of informal conversations with officials that are the lifeblood of serious national security reporting. The New York Times had held them for over forty years. Julian Barnes, the Times reporter at the center of this case, had held one almost continuously since 2004.
That arrangement ended on October 15, 2025, when the Department of Defense, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, implemented a new press credentialing policy that every PFAC holder was required to sign or surrender their credentials. The Times and virtually every other major news organization refused to sign. They handed in their press passes and walked out. For the first time since the Eisenhower administration, no major television network or national publication had a permanent presence inside the Pentagon.
The Times sued in December 2025, naming the Department of Defense, Secretary Hegseth, and Pentagon Chief Spokesman Sean Parnell as defendants. The lawsuit argued that the new policy violated the First Amendment right to freedom of the press and the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
On Friday, March 20, 2026, United States District Judge Paul L. Friedman agreed. His forty-page opinion in New York Times Co. v. Department of Defense struck down the challenged provisions of the policy, ordered the reinstatement of seven Times journalists’ credentials, and refused the government’s request to pause the ruling even for a single day pending appeal. The Pentagon announced almost immediately that it would appeal.
This piece explains what the policy actually said, why the court found it unconstitutional, and why the ruling matters beyond the immediate parties, particularly at a moment when the landscape of independent media is contracting in ways that make rulings like this one more consequential, not less.
What the Policy Required and Why Reporters Refused to Sign It
To understand the lawsuit, it helps to understand exactly what the Department was asking journalists to agree to.
The new policy, finalized in October 2025, required every PFAC holder to sign an acknowledgment stating they understood that their credentials could be “denied, revoked, or not renewed” if they were “reasonably determined to pose a security or safety risk” to Pentagon personnel or property. That standard sounds reasonable on its face. The problem was in the details. Under the policy’s own terms, a journalist could be deemed a security risk based on obtaining, or even attempting to obtain, any information the Department had not formally approved for public release. It also prohibited “solicitation” of non-public information, a term the policy defined so broadly that asking a question of a Pentagon employee could plausibly fall within it. Reporters who asked questions that led a Defense Department official to disclose something not approved for release could find their credentials at risk, even if the reporter had no idea the information was restricted.
There were 113 categories of what the policy called “controlled unclassified information,” and the policy made clear that receiving or publishing such information could trigger a credential review. No journalist could reasonably be expected to know what all 113 categories covered. In practice, the policy gave Department officials essentially unlimited discretion to brand any reporter a security risk for any act of ordinary journalism, without any meaningful standard to constrain them.
Major news organizations, including the Times, CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, and ABC, concluded that signing the acknowledgment was incompatible with the basic responsibilities of journalism and refused. The reporters handed in their credentials on October 15, 2025, and were replaced by a new press corps that included Laura Loomer, Mike Lindell, Matt Gaetz, and James O’Keefe, a man who had pleaded guilty to federal charges for entering federal property under false pretenses. The Pentagon credentialed O’Keefe anyway. It then separately informed the Washington Post that its standing tip line for military sources violated the very same policy that had apparently posed no obstacle to O’Keefe’s application. The inconsistency was not subtle, and the court took note of it at length.
The Court’s Analysis
Judge Friedman found the policy unconstitutional on two independent grounds, and his opinion is worth reading in full for anyone interested in how First Amendment law actually operates.
Starting with the Fifth Amendment, the due process clause requires that any rule a person can be punished for violating must be clear enough that a person of ordinary intelligence can understand what it prohibits. This policy failed that test in multiple ways. Because the criteria for revoking a credential were so open-ended, virtually any reporting activity could be characterized as prohibited solicitation if the Department chose to call it that. The court pointed to a particularly telling moment at oral argument, when the government’s own lawyer was unable to clearly explain what the policy actually prohibited, and then subsequently filed a written notice attempting to walk back what he had said in court. As Judge Friedman observed, if the lawyers defending the policy cannot explain with confidence what it means, reporters have no realistic way of knowing how to comply with it. That is precisely the kind of regulatory vagueness the due process clause is designed to prevent.
The First Amendment analysis was, if anything, more damning. The Pentagon’s press spaces are what courts call a nonpublic forum, meaning the government has opened them selectively rather than to the general public. In a nonpublic forum, the government can impose restrictions on access, but those restrictions must be viewpoint neutral and reasonable in light of the forum’s purpose. The policy failed both requirements. On viewpoint neutrality, the record assembled in the case was extensive and essentially undisputed. Secretary Hegseth and other senior Pentagon officials had publicly and repeatedly condemned specific news organizations by name, called established reporters “propagandists,” and praised the new credentialed personalities as people who were “on board and willing to serve our commander in chief.” Chief Spokesman Sean Parnell announced the new press corps on X as people who “circumvent the lies of the mainstream media.” The court’s conclusion was direct: the policy’s true purpose was to remove journalists who asked hard questions and replace them with outlets that would not. That is viewpoint discrimination, and it is flatly prohibited by the First Amendment regardless of whether the underlying policy language appears neutral on its face.
On reasonableness, the court found that the policy gave Department officials effectively unlimited discretion to grant or deny credentials with no meaningful standards to guide or constrain those decisions. A credentialing scheme that vests that kind of unbridled authority in government officials is independently unconstitutional, because the mere existence of that authority chills speech even when it is never formally invoked.
The remedy was correspondingly strong. Judge Friedman issued a permanent injunction, vacated the challenged provisions of the policy, ordered the credentials reinstated, and declined to give the government even a brief pause before the order took effect. He also gave the Pentagon one week to file a written report on its compliance. The government announced it would appeal, and that appeal will almost certainly be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Ghost of Daniel Ellsberg
Here is what makes this case particularly resonant for anyone who knows the history.
The court itself drew the connection to the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked that classified study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1971, and the government’s response was to sue the newspapers. It fought the Times in federal court over publication. What it did not do was try to revoke the reporters’ press credentials. It did not replace the Pentagon press corps with people more willing to carry the administration’s water. Briefings continued. The separation between the government’s displeasure with coverage and its authority over press access held.
Ellsberg believed the public had a right to know that successive administrations had systematically misled them about the course and prospects of the Vietnam War. He paid an enormous personal price for that belief. Prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The charges were eventually dismissed due to government misconduct. Throughout the litigation, though, the Pentagon never punished the journalists who reported what he gave them by stripping their access. Looking back, that restraint looks like institutional wisdom. It was a recognition that press credentialing and editorial disagreement are different things, and that collapsing the two creates something dangerous.
The policy that Judge Friedman struck down tried to collapse that separation entirely. It made access to the Pentagon conditional on producing the kind of coverage the Secretary of Defense approved of. That is not a government fighting publication in court. It is prior restraint achieved through bureaucratic architecture rather than injunction. The Founders understood the distinction. The First Amendment was written by people who had lived under the other kind of arrangement.
A Shrinking Press, and the People Who Know It
Judge Friedman’s ruling is hopeful. It has to be placed, though, against a backdrop that is anything but.
The press that the First Amendment is meant to protect has been contracting for years. More than 3,200 local newspapers have closed since 2005. National media consolidation has accelerated. The number of companies controlling the majority of what Americans see, read, and hear in the mainstream press is now fewer than five. That concentration has consequences for press independence that no court ruling can fully address. Ownership shapes editorial priorities. It shapes what stories get funded, which sources get cultivated, and which topics are treated as sensitive.
The Ellison family’s recent acquisitions make the point directly. David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison, runs Paramount Skydance. His company acquired CBS last August. He then installed Bari Weiss, a prominent critic of mainstream journalism, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The internal disruption was severe. A departing CBS Evening News producer wrote in a farewell memo that under the new regime, stories would be “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit, but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations,” creating pressure on reporters to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives.” That memo did not get much coverage, but it certainly should have.
CBS was only the beginning. In late February, after Netflix abruptly withdrew its competing bid, Paramount Skydance reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a transaction valued at approximately $111 billion. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN. The deal is pending shareholder and regulatory approval. If it closes, the Ellison family will control two of the country’s most watched television news organizations simultaneously.
Hegseth made no effort to hide how he feels about this prospect. At a Pentagon press briefing on March 13, reacting to CNN coverage of the Iran war, he dismissed the reporting as “patently ridiculous” and then added, without any apparent awareness of how it sounded: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” A sitting Secretary of Defense, at an official briefing, expressing impatience for a Trump-aligned billionaire to take ownership of a news organization that had been critical of the administration. He said it out loud. On camera.
Consider what that combination looks like together. The Pentagon excludes traditional press and replaces it with credentialed loyalists. A new press corps signs agreements acknowledging “security” standards vague enough to cover any journalism the Department dislikes. The Secretary openly roots for the pending sale of one of the remaining major independent networks to a family allied with the administration. And the regulatory approval required for that sale runs through an administration with an obvious interest in the outcome.
These things are not happening in isolation. They form a pattern. The outlets willing and able to ask hard questions of the government are getting fewer, not more. That is the environment in which Judge Friedman’s ruling arrived.
The Broader Pattern
Some will read this as a story about one administration’s hostility to the press, and they would not be wrong. But that framing lets everyone else off the hook too easily. Attacks on the First Amendment have never been the exclusive province of one political party or one era.
Democrats and Republicans alike have classified information to avoid accountability, pressured news organizations, and used the machinery of government to manage coverage they found inconvenient. The current case is extreme in its brazenness. It is not, however, unique in its impulse.
No government welcomes reporting on troop casualties, contractor fraud, or the distance between what officials say publicly and what their internal documents actually show. The tools used to manage that kind of coverage have a way of quietly expanding over time, and significantly so. Classification orders grow broader over time. New information categories also get created. The Pentagon alone, as the court noted in this case, recognizes 113 categories of controlled unclassified information. No journalist can know what all of them cover, which means any question asked in good faith could inadvertently touch a restricted category and trigger a credential review. That ambiguity does not arise by chance. A regulatory framework complex enough that no one can fully navigate it functions as a restraint on reporting without ever having to announce itself as one.
The difference now is scale. The converging pressures of media consolidation, official hostility to the press, and the selective application of “security” frameworks to journalists who ask the wrong questions are arriving at the same time. The number of institutional voices capable of sustaining the kind of long-term national security coverage that exposed the Pentagon Papers, that revealed Abu Ghraib, that documented the costs of the Iraq War, is smaller than it has been in decades.
Why This Should Matter to You
It is easy to look at this case and see a fight between powerful institutions, the New York Times on one side, the Pentagon on the other, with expensive lawyers arguing constitutional abstractions that have nothing to do with ordinary life. That reading is understandable. It is also wrong.
The Pentagon administers the largest single discretionary expenditure in the federal budget. It makes decisions that send American servicemembers into combat. Right now, as Judge Friedman noted in his opinion, the United States is engaged in military operations in Venezuela and at war with Iran. The people making those decisions do so with taxpayer money, in the name of citizens who have a constitutional right to know what is being done in their name.
The press is the primary mechanism through which that accountability operates. Reporters who have spent careers cultivating sources inside a building, learning the culture and the chain of command, developing the expertise to distinguish genuine security concerns from bureaucratic excuses, those reporters are not interchangeable with bloggers who promise to make the Secretary of Defense “proud.” The court understood this. It quoted veteran Pentagon correspondents who described how accurate reporting depends on in-person conversations, follow-up questions, and the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from sustained presence.
When that presence is replaced by a credentialed corps selected for ideological compatibility, the information the public receives degrades. That is not a First Amendment abstraction. It is a practical consequence for every person trying to understand what their government is doing abroad.
The Ruling as Precedent
The D.C. Circuit will almost certainly review this decision. The government announced an immediate appeal. The legal framework Judge Friedman applied, drawing heavily on the D.C. Circuit’s own decisions in Sherrill v. Knight and Karem v. Trump, is well-established. The factual record is extensive. The statements by Hegseth, Parnell, and Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson are in the record and were largely undisputed. The selective application of the policy is documented in detail.
Appeals courts reach their own conclusions, and no outcome is certain. But the legal principles here are deeply rooted, and the factual findings rest on a record the government largely chose not to contest.
More immediately, the ruling has already had an effect. Journalists pushed out of the Pentagon last fall are now discussing reinstatement. The five-month absence of a functioning independent press corps from one of the most consequential buildings in Washington may be coming to an end. Whether it holds depends on what happens next, including on appeal, and including in the ongoing consolidation of the media landscape that shapes who is even left to cover the Pentagon at all.
Conclusion
The First Amendment was not written to protect journalists. It was written to protect everyone else. Journalists are simply the mechanism through which that protection operates in practice. The people who drafted it had lived under a government that controlled what could be said and printed, and they understood something that tends to get lost in modern political arguments about media bias and fake news. Every government, regardless of who runs it, will reach for whatever tools are available to manage the story it tells about itself. The Founders knew that instinct would never disappear. So they built something designed to outlast it.
Judge Friedman’s ruling is a reminder that the structure still works, when litigants are willing to test it and courts are willing to apply it.
The ruling is also, in a moment when independent news outlets are closing, consolidating, or being repositioned to serve their new owners, a reminder of how much depends on maintaining the independence those structural protections were designed to guard.
The Pentagon may yet prevail on appeal. The Ellison acquisition of CNN may yet close on terms that prove the skeptics wrong. Neither outcome is certain.
But for now, the answer to the question of whether the government can strip a reporter’s press credentials because it does not like the questions being asked is no. It cannot. The answer has held for almost 250 years. It is worth defending.
The author is a securities and regulatory attorney in Chicago. This post reflects her personal views on matters of public concern.
Sources
The Court Opiniongov.uscourts.dcd.287334.35.0_1
New York Times Co. v. Department of Defense, Civil Action No. 25-04218 (PLF), Opinion, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (March 20, 2026)
Case Precedents Cited by the Court
Sherrill v. Knight, 569 F.2d 124 (D.C. Cir. 1977)
Karem v. Trump, 960 F.3d 656 (D.C. Cir. 2020)
Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539 (1976)
New York Times Co. v. United States (the Pentagon Papers case), 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
Ateba v. Leavitt, 133 F.4th 114 (D.C. Cir. 2025)
News Coverage of the Ruling
“Judge sides with New York Times in challenge to Pentagon policy limiting reporters’ access,” PBS NewsHour, March 20, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-sides-with-new-york-times-in-challenge-to-pentagon-policy-limiting-reporters-access
“U.S. judge rules against Pentagon restrictions on press coverage,” NPR, March 20, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/20/nx-s1-5755120/pentagon-press-policy-new-york-times-lawsuit
“Judge rules Pentagon press policy unconstitutional in case brought by NYT,” Washington Post, March 20, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/20/pentagon-press-policy-unconstitutional-nyt/
“Pete Hegseth Pentagon press policy unconstitutional, rules federal judge,” The Hill, March 20, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5794028-pentagon-press-restrictions-violate-first-amendment/
“Federal judge rules Pentagon policy restricting press access unconstitutional,” Fox News, March 20, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/media/federal-judge-rules-pentagon-policy-restricting-press-access-unconstitutional-hands-victory-new-york-times
“Judge strikes down restrictive Pentagon press policy,” CBS News, March 20, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-strikes-down-restrictive-pentagon-press-policy-finding-it-violates-first-amendment/
“The Pentagon’s press crackdown meets some real resistance,” CNN Business, March 21, 2026. https://us.cnn.com/2026/03/21/media/hegseth-pentagon-press-new-york-times-judge-ruling
“US judge sides with New York Times against Pentagon journalism policies,” Al Jazeera, March 20, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/20/us-judge-sides-with-new-york-times-against-pentagon-journalism-policies
Hegseth and CNN
“Pete Hegseth Says ‘The Sooner David Ellison Takes Over’ CNN ‘the Better,'” Variety, March 13, 2026. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/hegseth-cnn-sooner-david-ellison-takes-over-cnn-the-better-1236686911/
“Pete Hegseth Taunts CNN With Ellison Takeover Mid-Briefing,” HuffPost, March 13, 2026. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pete-hegseth-trashes-cnn-mid-briefing-ellison_n_69b41ec3e4b09d87d026f079
“Pete Hegseth Goes Off On CNN At Pentagon Presser,” Deadline, March 13, 2026. https://deadline.com/2026/03/pete-hegseth-cnn-paramount-david-ellison-1236752417/
“Hegseth Salivates Over David Ellison’s Planned Takeover of CNN,” The New Republic, March 13, 2026. https://newrepublic.com/post/207735/hegseth-cnn-david-ellison-takeover-iran
Ellison, Paramount, CBS, and CNN
“MAGA Billionaires Win Battle to Buy CNN and Turn It Trumpy,” The Daily Beast, February 26, 2026. https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-billionaires-win-battle-to-buy-cnn-and-turn-it-trumpy/
“David Ellison Vows CNN Will Be Independent as Paramount Buys WBD,” Variety, March 2026. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/david-ellison-cnn-independent-paramount-buys-warner-bros-discovery-1236680397/
“What does the Paramount-WBD merger mean for CNN?,” CNN Business, February 27, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/media/cnn-paramount-ellison-bari-weiss-wbd-merger
“With Paramount’s winning WBD bid, David and Larry Ellison are amassing a media empire,” CNN Business, February 26, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/26/business/paramount-wbd-merger-david-ellison
“Netflix backs out of bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, giving studios, HBO, and CNN to Ellison-owned Paramount,” TechCrunch, February 26, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/26/netflix-warner-bros-discovery-paramount-wbd-bid-studios-hbo-cnn-ellison/
“Paramount, Warner Bros deal would unite film, news and social media forces,” NPR, February 27, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5728865/warner-bros-paramount-ellison-family
“CNN future in question after Thursday’s stunning Warner Bros. Discovery sale news,” Poynter, February 27, 2026. https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2026/netflix-pulls-out-warner-bros-discovery-paramount-deal/