Interior Department orders park service to cut off SFGate after critical coverage

National Park Service public affairs employees were instructed not to respond to inquiries from SFGate after the San Francisco, California, outlet published a Feb. 10, 2026, article critical of new park service media rules, it reported.

In a March 18 article, SFGate detailed how the online news site’s national parks bureau had sent “dozens of inquiries” to the National Park Service for stories over the previous month, but did not receive any responses.

Citing internal department communications that the outlet reviewed, as well as interviews with “multiple insiders” who were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs, SFGate reported that it was “blacklisted” by the public affairs office at the Department of the Interior, which oversees the park service, after publication of the Feb. 10 article.

The piece detailed a new approval process for park exhibits and other public-facing content, as well as limits on how the park service may interact with the media and the public. The process is designed to help the service align with a Trump administration executive order that critics in the report characterized as “part of a broad attempt to control the nation’s narratives.”

The Feb. 10 article, quoting park service insiders and nonprofit leaders, described how “confusion over the new policies is rampant, a culture of fear is pervasive, and ignored or denied media requests have become commonplace.”

SFGate reported that in the wake of that article, a park service employee told the outlet that they had been instructed not to respond to any of its inquiries — while continuing to respond to other outlets about the same topics.

SFGate quoted a park service communications employee as saying, “On a national level, you guys are the only ones I’ve ever heard of getting blacklisted.”

In an emailed statement for the March 18 article, Interior Department Communications Director Katie Martin told SFGate that the outlet “has distorted the facts and has caused confusion with their reporting with the mainstream media. This has caused the Department to spend countless hours correcting their false narrative with other media outlets.”

Martin also challenged the assertion that the outlet had been shut out in the wake of the Feb. 10 story, noting that a contributor received an email from the department Feb. 12 in response to a question about how to attribute a statement about an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Once again, SFGate is choosing their own narrative regardless of the facts,” Martin wrote.

However, SFGate noted, “Apart from that email, another reiterating a similar statement about Trump’s order and the ones sent in response to inquiries for this story, the Department of the Interior hasn’t responded to any media request.” It added that the National Park Service had not responded to a single inquiry in that time period.

SFGate reported that in the week the Feb. 10 article was published, spokespeople for the park service said they started receiving verbal instructions from Elizabeth Peace, an Interior Department senior public affairs specialist, to ignore the outlet. And then in early March, department officials gave instructions, through internal communications that the outlet reviewed, to ignore SFGate journalists.

SFGate noted that it had several Freedom of Information Act requests pending with the Interior Department, and that it expected a response to those, as required by law.

“In the meantime, we’ll file more requests and continue connecting with our large network of sources inside and outside the Park Service. We’ll keep producing hard-hitting journalism that holds the Trump administration accountable for its handling of the public’s most beloved federal agency — and do more stories like the one that apparently triggered this ban,” SFGate Editor-in-Chief Grant Marek told the outlet.

The Interior Department, National Park Service and SFGate did not respond to requests for comment from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.