In a blow to the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against a free press, a federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of the New York Times in its December suit against the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets.
Senior US District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a Clinton-appointee, ruled that a policy the Defense Department established in October, saying the Pentagon could revoke press credentials of any reporter who asked for information the department didn’t want to release was unconstitutional.
“A lot of things need to be held tightly and secure,” Friedman wrote. “But openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace and, more important, in times of war and upheaval.” The United States ongoing war against Iran, the judge said in his ruling, makes it “more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing.”
In the wake of the Pentagon’s restrictive decree, dozens of reporters—including seven Times journalists—turned in their access badges in protest instead of bowing to the new policy. Five major broadcast networks, too, announced that they weren’t going to comply with the Pentagon’s new rules, writing in a joint statement that the “policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.” NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and CNN signed on, along with Fox News Media, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used to work before heading up the world’s biggest military operation.
In the absence of these journalists, the Defense Department filled in the ranks with pro-Trump commentators and influencers. Friedman noted in his ruling that the policy rewarded those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” On Friday, he tossed out the policy for all journalists covering the Pentagon and ordered the DOD to restore the press passes of the seven Times journalists.
In a social media post, Sean Parnell, chief spokesman at the Pentagon, said it is “pursuing an immediate appeal.”
Friday’s ruling is a key win for press freedom in the administration’s ongoing legal battles against media organizations he views as unfriendly. Trump is currently embroiled in legal battles against the Wall Street Journal and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, the New York Times (in a different case), the British Broadcasting Company, the Des Moines Register and veteran pollster Ann Selzer, the Pulitzer Prize board, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster, along with media giant Paramount, and CNN.
While some organizations—like Paramount Global and ABC News—have settled with the President, others, like the Times, have pushed back on Trump in court—and won.
On the whole, these legal attacks represent an unparalleled offensive on press freedom from a figure who has been raging against news organizations and individual journalists for decades. During his first term and beyond, on social media and face-to-face, he has attacked the media relentlessly as the “enemy of the people” and incited followers to harass reporters covering his rallies. He calls journalists treasonous and says they should be jailed.
According to a US Press Freedom Tracker database, from the moment Trump announced that candidacy in 2015 to early 2021, he posted negatively about the media more than 2,490 times on Twitter. He often reserves his most biting personal insults for women—since Trump was re-elected he has called female reporters “stupid,” “nasty,” “ugly,” “piggy,” and “maggot.” He also criticized CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling—a misogynistic trope—as she was asking him a question about Jeffrey Epstein.
Following Judge Friedman’s ruling on Friday, a spokesman for the Times wrote that the decision “reaffirms the right of The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the public’s behalf.”