The New York Times sued the Defense Department on Monday for the second time in five months, arguing that a requirement that journalists be escorted while on Pentagon grounds violates the First Amendment. The escort policy is “an unconstitutional attempt by the Pentagon to prevent independent reporting on military affairs,” a Times spokesman, Charlie Stadtlander, said in an email to The Associated Press.“As we have said before: Americans deserve visibility into how their government is being run, and the actions the military is taking in their name and with their tax dollars.”On X, Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell called the Times’ latest lawsuit “nothing more than an attempt to remove the barriers to them getting their hands on classified information.”
Continuing tension between the administration and the mediaThe Times lawsuit is another salvo in what has become an escalating tension between the U.S. media and the second Trump administration, which has played out both in the public arena and at times in the courts. 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.” The new policy included a requirement that journalists be accompanied by escorts at all times while in the Pentagon.
