(Bloomberg) — The Defense Department will no longer allow media organizations to keep offices in the Pentagon building after a federal judge ruled that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had improperly revoked credentials for dozens of them.
The Pentagon will close what’s known as the Correspondents’ Corridor after deciding that access to the building in Arlington, Virginia, “cannot be responsibly maintained “without the ability to screen credential holders for security risks,” department spokesman Sean Parnell announced on X.
Parnell said that a “new and improved” press work area would be established in an annex facility outside that will be “available when ready.”
The decision upends decades of precedent to which reporters with media credentials maintained work spaces in the Pentagon building — an arrangement that successive defense secretaries in both Republican and Democratic administrations found posed no security risks.
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It marked an escalation by Hegseth’s office three days after US District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington ruled in favor of a lawsuit brought by the New York Times, which accused the administration of free speech violations.
Last fall, Hegseth demanded that news organizations agree to new limits on their reporting. The Pentagon policy put journalists in danger of being labeled “a security risk” that could’ve led to credentials being pulled if they were found soliciting material that could be considered classified or Controlled Unclassified Information, a ubiquitous label on Defense Department documents.
That standard, Friedman wrote in his opinion, “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials. The policy therefore is vague in violation of the Fifth Amendment.”
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