In the predawn hours of October 25, 1983, several hundred United States Navy Seals, Marines, and Army Rangers landed on the island of Grenada, ¹spearheading an assault force that included contingents from seven Caribbean nations. The commander of the invasion task force, backed by the Reagan Administration, excluded the news media from the island for the first two days of the operation. Administration officials asserted that the exclusion was necessary to achieve military surprise, to permit the invasion force to concentrate on its objectives without the distraction and obstruction that a press presence would cause, and to avoid devoting troops to the task of protecting the safety of reporters. Press groups and others, however, swiftly denounced the exclusion as a violation of the norms of freedom of the press. 

The question of whether the press may constitutionally be excluded from the battlefield pits the guarantee of freedom of the press against the obligation of the government to protect national security during crises and involves a situation that neither Congress nor the courts have addressed. While apprehension on the part of the news media may have subsided somewhat since a special Defense Department panel issued a report on the subject of press coverage of military operations, the truce between the Pentagon and the press remains uneasy.