After the U.S. Department of Defense enacted new rules for Pentagon reporters in late September, the Ethics and Journalism Initiative asked NYU journalism professors who teach ethics classes to share their thoughts about the new policy. We posed this question:
News organizations are debating how to respond to the new Pentagon rules, whose constitutionality is in doubt. Some outlets may opt to give up official reporting privileges at the Pentagon in order to remain independent. But for others — including wire services and television networks — giving up official access to Pentagon briefings may not be possible. There’s also an argument that mainstream journalists should not cede Pentagon access to right-wing outlets. If you were the standards editor at a news organization with a Pentagon reporter, what would you consider and advise?
Charles Seife, Director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University:
“For me, it would mean good riddance to the Pentagon briefing.
Reporters have long accepted the manipulation that goes with government press briefings as a tradeoff for the useful and important information that comes from those briefings (and for the relationships that the reporters make with the flacks and the sources.) But the manipulation has increased steadily as the information has decreased.
A few years ago, I studied the phenomenon of background briefings — press events where government officials speak to a room full of reporters on the condition that the officials can’t be identified by name. Background briefings are a different sort of mechanism for restricting what and how journalists can report. Over the time period I studied, the proportion of U.S. State Department briefings that were done on background went from 20% at the beginning of the Obama administration to 90% by 2014. The standard, on-the-record press conference where the official was willing to publicly stand by his or her statement had more or less disappeared. Yet, as far as I can tell, the press corps put up zero resistance against the increasing restrictions imposed by the government.
In my own field, science journalism, my colleagues have generally been willing to accept restrictions on their reporting that should call their reportorial independence into question. Chief among them is the so-called embargo: an agreement not to publish information before a certain date and time. But as docile as science journalists are, they reacted strongly when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tried to restrict the people from whom they could gather information, and the agency (nominally) rescinded its policy shortly thereafter. Formal restrictions on information gathering are a bridge too far, even for the science journalist.
For me, that the press would even consider abiding a restriction on reportage for the privilege of attending government-sponsored pseudoevents is a sign of journalistic capture: that journalists have become so enmeshed with, so dependent upon, their government sources that they are no longer serving their audience as much as they are serving (wittingly or unwittingly) the people they are supposed to cover.”
Paul Sleven, NYU journalism ethics professor and former Macmillan general counsel:
“As I see it, the ethical issues at stake are, first and foremost, the press’s responsibility to its readers and listeners to gather all the newsworthy information it can and report it accurately and objectively and, second and more broadly, the press’s responsibility to the public to publicize and protest threats to freedom of the press.
The ethical dilemma is clear: Should reporters simply refuse on principle to cooperate with this new censorship regime or report as best they can within the constraints it imposes? Some may think that compliance is unthinkable, but journalists all the time report, and report important stories, within censorship regimes in countries less free than we used to be and mostly still are. I suspect that those journalists think that what they do, compromised though it may be, is better for their readers and listeners than refusal to participate at all.
As a first step, I think it is fairly clear that the media should, if possible, collectively refuse to agree to abide by the new restrictions. I assume that the U.S. Department of War lets reporters into the Pentagon to serve its own purposes at least as much as to serve the people’s right to know. What if they gave a briefing and nobody came? If nothing else, the collective effort would focus public attention on the restrictions and perhaps add to the smattering of objections we’ve heard from President Trump’s allies. If everyone in the press stuck together, the Pentagon would probably back down at least to some extent, but, as your question recognizes, the right-wing media is unlikely to join such a refusal.
What should happen if collective refusal does not force sufficient change in the restrictions? For some journalists, the lack of access may not matter much. But for others, the lack of access would substantially hamper their ability to report, meaning that, for them, refusal to participate, which may at first have seemed the only ethical choice, would yield a result that is worse for the public’s right to know than compliance.
For those journalists who can’t realistically do their jobs without press passes, compliance becomes the only alternative. They would have to do the best they can under the circumstances, always clearly stating in their reporting that their disclosure of information is subject to Pentagon authorization, and complaining loudly and publicly if and when a story is actually censored. Perhaps they could publish any censored article as originally written with the censored portions blacked out visibly or broadcast a censored story as originally written with the censored portions bleeped out as obscenities are. That may do a better job of keeping the issue of censorship before the public than any refusal to comply on principle. Might it work for large news organizations to have reporters physically present in the Pentagon and therefore subject to these restrictions and others working outside and therefore not subject to them?
As a lawyer, albeit not an expert in national security law, let me add that I am not confident that the courts would find these restrictions unconstitutional. The courts are exceedingly deferential to the executive on national security matters. Courts may well conclude that efforts by government agencies, particularly the DoW, to control what information they release do not violate the First Amendment. I am not aware of any cases holding that efforts to fight leaks or discipline leakers are themselves unconstitutional. And, the courts are likely to be sympathetic to the right of any government agency, again especially the Pentagon, to control access to its premises. See, for example, the appellate decision temporarily upholding the barring of AP from certain press events, done for a reason less defensible from a First Amendment standpoint than the new DoW restrictions.
I don’t want to be too negative about any court challenge to these restrictions. The method these restrictions use to prevent unauthorized leaks is prior restraint, which should be precluded by the Pentagon Papers case. The difference here, however, is that DoW would be getting the press to consent to the prior restraint as a condition of granting access that DoW is not constitutionally required to afford in the first place. Lawyers more expert in this area of law may well have a different view, and I hope someone does mount a legal challenge, but we should not see this as a slam-dunk case.”
Robin Marantz Henig, NYU journalism ethics professor and veteran science author and journalist:
“I’ve been yelling at the breakfast table since Inauguration Day over each new incursion into press freedoms — with nothing really to show for it other than an increasingly annoyed husband. From the first moment of Trump’s assault on the media, when he barred the AP from White House press conferences because they wouldn’t use his preferred terminology for the Gulf of Mexico, I was stunned by the lack of solidarity among journalists. Why did anyone attend those press conferences if one of their colleagues could not? If all White House reporters had chosen to turn their backs in protest of that one terrible decision about the AP reporter, things might have gone differently. (I felt the same about universities; if one of them is under threat, they all are, and they all should have responded as a bloc from the very beginning.)
At every step along the way, there should have been more solidarity. Decisions about membership in the White House press corps are suddenly being made by the president? Okay, boycott the press conferences. Hear the president berate reporter after reporter for the way she asks a question — which usually seems to happen when the reporter is female or Black or both? Have the next reporter repeat that question. And the next. And the next. And if he still stonewalls, walk away.
Now we’ve gotten to the point that everyone in the executive branch feels they can call the shots about who interacts with the press, and how it’s done. I worry for my students in science journalism, who might be told that any comment from a government scientist has to ferry through a single press officer in [Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s] office (a true believer), who might not even get back to them. But it’s not just the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; it seems almost every department wants to be sure to control who gets to report what, and wants to be sure that the people speaking to the press are toeing the party line (which they disguise with terms like “in accordance with the Executive Order,” as though that somehow makes it less autocratic).
That’s the context in which I see the proclamation by the Department of Defense that every reporter covering the Pentagon has to sign a pledge — a loyalty oath? — that they won’t write anything that hasn’t been approved through official channels. This isn’t just another step toward autocracy, as The New York Times and other mainstream publications keep qualifying it. Face it: We’re already there. This is just another indication that Trump and his cronies control access to government information, just the way dictators in other totalitarian countries do.
And this is all happening while our sense of “the media” is growing more and more distorted. Look at who is allowed into the White House press room. Look at the ownership of a growing group of broadcast and cable television channels, and how [U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair] Brendan Carr waves around FCC licensing power like a cudgel to make those billionaire owners dance to his dance. Look at The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and how those billionaire owners, too, are doing what they can to get invited to sit at the big boys’ table.
There have been so many “last straws” recently that it’s hard to resist the feeling that this DoD decision is, finally, the last straw. But I’m afraid it’s just more of the same. And Pentagon reporters will probably abide by the new restrictions, just as reporters covering HHS and the Department of Justice and the White House have done, and hope to find something of value to write about anyway.”
Adam Penenberg, Director of NYU’s Online Master’s in Journalism program:
“What’s happening looks less like policy than political theater on legal stationery. The Pentagon floated a pledge that would turn independent reporting into permissioned reporting—on pain of losing credentials—even for unclassified material. It’s maximalist on paper, incendiary in headlines, and (so far) unenforced. But it buys time, chills coverage while lawyers grind, and nudges the Overton window toward government-approved journalism—without passing a law or signing an executive order.
As performance, it works: Set an extreme anchor (“sign or lose access”), let the press debate whether to walk, then “clarify” later while pocketing the chill. Even with a court fight looming, the gambit extracts concessions in the meantime: more caution in sourcing; fewer unflattering, unclassified scoops; and a press corps diverted into process stories about access instead of substance about the Pentagon. This White House understands the value you can create with threat and noise.
It’s also a distraction engine. When awkward stories crest—say, fresh Epstein filings splashing familiar names—drop a provocative press policy and dominate a few cycles with “media vs. Pentagon.” If blowback gets hot, claim the pledge was misread or meant for officials.
This isn’t a constitutional crisis so much as a leverage play: make peacetime reporting feel like wartime compliance, provoke outrage, harvest the chill. Whether the pledge survives isn’t the point. Moving the boundary of what the press will tolerate next time is. Refuse the premise—and keep reporting, not the stunt, at the center.
Stephen Solomon, Marjorie Deane Professor of Journalism at New York University; Founding Editor, First Amendment Watch
“I believe that the ethical responsibility of journalists is to refuse their consent to participation in a system of official censorship that this agreement represents. I think that news organizations should refuse to sign the agreement. If they are denied access to official press conferences for refusal to sign, they could join in a lawsuit for violation of the First Amendment .
News organizations are not without influence here. If they refuse to go along with this agreement, they can continue to report from their own sources. The government wants its official story out more than anything else, and could eventually decide to rescind the agreement requirement if journalists assert their independence and get all their stories from other sources.”
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