I previously criticized the new Pentagon policies for media organizations. While the Trump Administration made some changes, the rules remained unduly restrictive and unprecedented. As a result, virtually every news organization, including Fox News, refused to sign the agreements at the deadline — a decision that I strongly support.
The changes will effectively bar most media from the Pentagon, undermining the department’s ability to work with reporters to ensure accurate reporting on military operations.
The Pentagon Press Association objected last week that a revised policy still seeks to prohibit journalists from soliciting unauthorized information in addition to accessing it. It said that the rules appeared to be “designed to stifle a free press and potentially expose us to prosecution for simply doing our jobs.”
The PPA added that the revised policy “conveys an unprecedented message of intimidation to everyone within the DoD, warning against any unapproved interactions with the press and even suggesting it’s criminal to speak without express permission – which plainly, it is not”.
The relationship with the press can be strained at times, and tensions with the Trump Administration are notoriously high. However, this is a “beat” that requires close and ongoing communications to keep the media (and the public) fully informed of military policies and programs.
The organizations refusing to sign include outlets that are viewed as supportive of the Trump Administration with large conservative audiences.
Many of us have joined the Trump Administration in criticizing the bias of most media outlets. Indeed, the public reflects the same criticism in polling with the media at record lows of public trust. However, this move is gratuitous and self-defeating.
Despite the anger at the media and the need for serious reforms in many outlets, we need to protect the free press, which plays a critical role in our constitutional system.
Thus far, only One America News Network has agreed to the new regulations.
As I stated earlier, I am dubious about possible legal challenges over access to the Pentagon. Other agencies such as the CIA do not allow general access to the media. The Administration, in my view, has the advantage in any challenges over such rules.
“…However, this move is gratuitous and self-defeating.”
I don’t think so. I’ll bet the vast majority of Vets and Americans feel the same as I do. This is not a gossip column about Hollywood, this is the Pentagon. This is not interfering with a free press at all. This is our Military. It is vitally important that data is not leaked out willy-nilly. There must be a need to know, and there must be control of all information. That’s like basic infosec 101. Loose lips sink ships.
What surprises me about this is how open communication within DoD has been up to now. No private company would allow reporters to wander around freely in its offices seeking information form any and all employees. Have reporters really had this kind of access to the organization that needs to keep defense actions and plans secret? That’s astounding! And now they expect it; treat it as a right? Equally amazing.
Everything leaked ends up in Russia or China. The news media leaks anything the can get their hands, cameras, or eyes on for “likes” and material to pad their “I hate Trump” bona fides.
I’m mixed on the subject of the media covering the military.
I see soooo many times an article, or a paragraph within an article – that I cannot
understand why it would be printed?
Things that *I* think should be deemed ‘secret’, things that John Q Public doesn’t
NEED to know – yet they get printed.
Did the public REALLY need to know the flight patterns/how we pulled off the
bombing attack on the nuclear research facilites in Iran?
NO!
NOBODY needed to know.
Hasn’t anyone learned a thing from ‘Wiki Leaks’? NOTHING they ‘leaked’ should
have ever gotten out – some of those ‘leaks’ has led to the deaths of a handful of
actual SPIES working for the USA – as well as a few other foreign governments.
As far as the press hounding people in the Pentagon, there is a simple fix: ‘No Comment’
Would Professor Turley feel the First Amendment is protected if every journalist who walks into the Pentagon is assigned a young jarhead, straight out of boot camp to be their friendly, helpful escort everywhere they go while in the building unless it’s a toilet stall?
If the journalist wants to talk to anybody in uniform or a government employee other than authorized spokesmen, their smiling escort will be there.
No military or government employees – or the journalist – will be tempted to commit crimes concerning classified information or disobey standing military orders while the journalist speaks with that person!
If the journalist wants to talk instead with anybody who isn’t a government employee i.e. another journalist, that jarhead will have standing orders to step away out of hearing.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner, right? Everybody legitimately doing their job wins! Those intent on criminal acts and USMCJ violations might think otherwise, of course.
With the problem solved: how is it that the First Amendment is violated by attempting to prevent the media from wandering wherever they want in a police station, CIA headquarters, the Pentagon, or even a hospital? Where does Professor Turley find that right to wander wherever they want in the First Amendment? Some of those left over 1970’s SCOTUS ’emanations and penumbras’ around the Bill of Rights?
Finally: where are First Amendment rights violated by preventing these so called impartial journalists from soliciting War Department employees and military personnel to commit criminal acts and Uniform Code of Military Justice violations, Professor Turley?
They just can’t do REAL journalism without soliciting those criminal acts from OUR employees, not theirs, in the military and War Department?
Sooo… the definition of a free press is “you get to solicit members of the military to commit criminal acts by providing you with classified information. A criminal act that is also in direct disobedience of orders”?
The military has always been under orders not to speak with journalists – or anyone else about – issues; the military has public affairs officers and designated people whose job is specifically to answer those questions.
But that isn’t good enough for the media; it’s about THEM. Media who are about as honest and impartial as Democrat Washington DC lawyers.
We need a “free press” that howls they are incapable of doing their job unless given the right to solicit criminal acts and ask military personnel to violate standing orders? And then they will decide whether or not they publish what they learn, depending on whether it is favorable or negative towards the administration in power they’re aligned with?
No – they’ve done enough damage already with related examples of covering for and pushing the Russia Dossier, the Biden laptop, etc.
If they were truly impartial journalists, I would give them some trust and cut them some slack. But they are the exact opposite of that, whether at the Pentagon or elsewhere.
The Inspector General’s three reports into the Trump-Russia Dossier found that 37 FBI agents/employees working on that accepted “gratuities” from people in the news media while leaking. If you’re thinking it was something like a free cup of coffee given to a cop working the graveyard beat around an all night diner, you’re wrong. We’re talking about gratuities like two seats at center ice at a Washington Capitals NHL hockey game. Anybody believe not one of those leakers ever told the media “Comey and McCabe know this is all Hillary Clinton engineered BS”?
And they decided to bury that and instead push the felonious Russia Dossier fraud.
The Secret Service and many other people today get polygraphed as part of what they do for a living. A polygraph for everyone working in the pentagon concerning unauthorized giving of information to anybody in any form of media would be a good start.
And prosecute journalists who bribed military or law enforcement personnel with “gratuities” in exchange for leaks.
If you carry water for a political activist group … don’t complain when you get wet. The media has acted in such a way that they have no reason to question restrictions. That is like looking into a water hose and getting hit in the face with a blast of water, what did you think would happen.
*. I’ll stick with the Pentagon attack, 911, as a need for ultimate security. I’m not privvy to threats and the many threats turned to action. Maximum security for Trump’s presidency seems appropriate.
I appreciate preserving the free press. The MSM are no longer that, as elucidated by columns on this very blog. This is a rare instance where I will call, ‘head in the sand’, on the Professor. Those days are gone for good. How we proceed is what matters, and hopefully it is with as much integrity as we can muster.
These folks are still free to write and post whatever they like; that was not true under whomever was running the Biden admin. How quickly we forget.
Klaus Fuchs was one of Robert Oppenheimers young turks on the Manhattan Project. He was a real communist. He walked the plans for the A Bomb off the campus of Los Alamos and got them to Joe Stalin. He made it to the USSR and got praise and a dacha for his trouble. That national security event explains why the DOW is no friend of press freedom. Nor the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). We need a balance of how much press freedom of access we want and how many Klaus Fuchses we want.