| Sumario: | The article focuses on lawsuits filed by Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1983 in an effort to establish a First Amendment right of the media to battlefield access. Flynt lost that round, for the frustrating and sometimes perplexing reason that the U.S. federal appeals court in the District of Columbia found the case moot. In both Flynt's case and in subsequent cases brought by other news organizations during the first Persian Gulf War, federal judges, reluctant to tackle the fundamental question, instead ruled that because each war was different, each set of restrictions is also different. On October 30, 2001, Flynt sent Victoria Clarke, then spokeswoman of the U.S. Department of Defense a letter, asking that his Hustler reporters be allowed to accompany ground troops on combat missions and elsewhere on the battlefields in Afghanistan. More than two weeks later, Clarke faxed him saying that because only special operations were going on at the time, it was too dangerous to embed journalists with the units. On November 16, 2001, Flynt sued in federal district court in Washington, D.C., claiming the Defense's directive and controversial statement of principles on media access, deprived him of his First Amendment right of access to the battlefield.
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