Former CNN reporter and longtime Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth New policy of the department Restricting access to the building for journalists, predicting that this would lead to more candid coverage of the Trump administration’s defense policy.
“Pete Hegseth genuinely believes that confiscating the Pentagon access passes of journalists who don’t sign up for his new rules will stem the flow of news he doesn’t like,” Star. wrote in a new post Mondays on Substack. “Well think again. Journalists and the news organizations they work for are tougher professionally and mentally than they can imagine. So buckle up.”
Several top news organizations, from The New York Times to Newsmax, have said they will not sign off on a new policy severely restricting access to the Pentagon before a Tuesday deadline set by the department.
The Pentagon Press Association, as a board member of which Starr covered national security and defense issues for CNN during his decades., strongly condemned The new policy last week accused Hegseth and Pentagon leadership of sending “an unprecedented message of intimidation to everyone within the DOD.”
Starr wrote, “Hegseth fails to understand that the First Amendment means the Pentagon cannot have the authority to prevent journalists from doing their job: reporting the news.” “The government cannot prevent news reporting before publication, especially the publication of non-classified information.”
Starr covered the Pentagon from 1989 until his retirement from the network in 2022.
“I have full confidence that if the Pentagon sticks to Hegseth’s plan, news stories and reporting will continue without interruption, with reporters covering the U.S. military talking to Congress, other government agencies, the White House, and even other countries,” he wrote in his Substack post.
He added, “They will also continue to talk to military officials. They will risk their lives by traveling to war zones. They will sacrifice time spent with their families to cover the news.”
