Barbara Starr: Hegseth should ‘buckle up’ for tougher media coverage
Former CNN reporter and longtime Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr blasted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the department’s new policy restricting access to the building for journalists, predicting it will lead to more pointed coverage of the Trump administration’s defense policy.
“Pete Hegseth genuinely seems to believe that confiscating Pentagon access passes for journalists who don’t sign up for his new rules will stop the flow of news he doesn’t like,” Starr wrote in a new post on Substack on Monday. “Well think again. Journalists, and the news organizations they work for, are professionally and mentally tougher than he can even imagine. So buckle up.”
A number of top news organizations, ranging from The New York Times to Newsmax, have stated they will not sign a new policy severely restricting access to the Pentagon ahead of a Tuesday deadline set by the department.
The Pentagon Press Association, on which Starr served as a board member during her decades covering national security and defense issues for CNN, issued a blistering condemnation of the new policy last week, accusing Hegseth and Pentagon leadership of sending “an unprecedented message of intimidation to everyone within the DoD.”
“What Hegseth has failed to understand is the First Amendment means that the Pentagon cannot have the right to stop reporters from doing their jobs: reporting the news,” Starr wrote. “News reporting cannot be stopped by the government prior to publication, especially publication of non classified information.”
Starr covered the Pentagon from 1989 until she retired from the network in 2022.
“I have abounding confidence that if the Pentagon sticks with Hegseth’s plan then the news stories and reporting will continue with no pause. Reporters covering the US military talk to Congress, to other government agencies, to the White House and even to other nations,” she wrote in her Substack post.
“They will also continue to talk to military officials. They will risk their lives by traveling in combat zones. They will give up cherished family time to cover the news,” she continued.