A Times Lawyer on Why the Pentagon Lawsuit Matters

“Hi, I’m David McCraw, deputy general counsel at The New York Times Company, and I head our newsroom legal team. Last year, the Pentagon introduced an entire new set of rules to govern people who had press passes. The concept of a press pass is pretty simple. A reporter who has a press pass is allowed into the building, whether that’s the White House or the Pentagon or the Statehouse. In the new administration, those rules were changed dramatically. For the first time, there were restrictions on the reporting that could be done. Reporters were not to ask for information from people in the military who were not authorized to give it. The other thing that we ended up suing over was that the government, in this case, the Pentagon, essentially said, We get to decide when you lose your press pass. The rules were written in such a way that no one could know for certain what kind of conduct, what kind of activity by a reporter could lead to the revocation of a press pass. We were very, very pleased that Judge Friedman in the District of Columbia federal court essentially agreed to every point we made. The judge agreed with us that the rules concerning revocation of press passes were unconstitutional, and importantly, agreed with us that the rules were an attack on our First Amendment rights. After the ruling came down, the Pentagon initially said it was going to appeal. That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the Pentagon decided to rewrite the rules. That was a direct contradiction to what the judge had said. We went back to court. We filed a motion asking the judge to order the Pentagon to abide by the rule. The right to publish information, which is at the heart of the First Amendment, becomes meaningless if there is not also a right to gather information. We looked at these rules as a direct attack on that right, on the right of reporters to ask questions, to get information. The public gets served because reporters are asking hard questions and going behind the official statements to find out what’s really going on. That’s really one of the key purposes of journalism in this country.