Pentagon bars journalists from its press office

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - WASHINGTON — In another move restricting media access at the Pentagon, the Defense Department has declared that its press office is now a classified space inaccessible to journalists.

On X, acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez confirmed the move, saying: “The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility.”

Valdez said it came because speechwriters, who routinely handle classified material, were now occupying the space. "There’s nothing controversial about that,” he said.

The latest move, first reported by The Washington Post, took place against a backdrop of escalating tensions between the US media and the second Trump administration, which has played out both in the public arena and at times in the courts.

The defense department, which the Trump administration prefers to call the war department, began rolling out new restrictions to press access in September, when the military demanded journalists pledge not to gather any information that had not been authorized for release or else risk revocation of their press passes.

Credentialed journalists have long had broad access to the Pentagon, but after the defense department announced sweeping restrictions to their work, many longtime reporters refused to agree and began turning over their press passes in October.

The same month, the department announced a “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” featuring 60 journalists from far-right outlets.

The New York Times sued the Pentagon over those policies, which designated journalists as “security risks”, and a federal judge found in the Times’s favor in March.

In response, the defense department issued an interim policy barring journalists from visiting the Pentagon without an official escort. A district judge ruled that that interim policy violated his order, but it remained in place when an appeals court stayed part of the ruling to allow the government time to appeal.

The New York Times sued the Defense Department on May 18 for the second time in five months, arguing that a requirement that journalists be escorted while on Pentagon grounds violates the First Amendment and is “an unconstitutional attempt by the Pentagon to prevent independent reporting on military affairs.”

The paper said it had filed the additional lawsuit after first suing the Pentagon in December over new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to challenge an interim policy “that the Pentagon hastily put into place after a federal judge ruled in The Times’s favor in its original lawsuit.”