US and international news outlets including The New York Times, AP, AFP and Fox News on Tuesday declined to sign new restrictive Pentagon media rules, meaning they will be stripped of their press access credentials.

The new rules come after the Defense Department restricted media access inside the Pentagon, forced some outlets to vacate offices in the building and drastically reduced the number of briefings for journalists.

The media policy “gags Pentagon employees” by threatening retaliation against reporters who seek out information that has not been pre-approved for release, the Pentagon Press Association (PPA) said.

AFP said in a statement Tuesday that it “cannot sign up to the terms of the Pentagon document that would require media to acknowledge insufficiently clear new policies t

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