For the first time in more than 60 years, CBS News will close out the week without a workspace in the Pentagon after declining — along with nearly every major news organization — to sign onto new press requirements that reporters’ associations say could infringe on their First Amendment rights.
During D-Day, CBS News radio correspondent Joseph F. McCaffrey reported live from the Pentagon about the strategy and General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s background.
“Most of the plotting, the working, the split-haired timing was done in this building,” McCaffrey reported on June 6, 1944. “Although only a chosen few knew when the day would arrive, the atmosphere here in the Pentagon building has been tense for several weeks.” Listen to the audio here.
CBS News had radio correspondents in the building since the 1940s and a TV network booth, or mini-office, in an area designated for media since the 1970s. Over the past two decades, as the networks have been able to go live from the building, “on-air” lights flash on when major news breaks, and journalists relay information to the public live from the Pentagon.
For most of that time, CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin was the one breaking the news and reporting out every story. The Pentagon gave him his first press badge in 1983, his longtime producer Mary Walsh 10 years later. Since then, the duo has not only covered every military conflict, but also told stories about the military’s service members and their lives.
“I’m proud of the work David Martin and I have done, telling stories of valor on the battlefield and courage and resilience at Walter Reed,” Walsh wrote in an email before turning in her Pentagon press credential this week. “I have been inspired and humbled by the fortitude of these men and women, their willingness to sacrifice everything for our country.”
Many of those stories emerged from relationships built because of CBS News’ constant presence inside the Pentagon.
“Walking the halls of the Pentagon was my M.O. for 40 years. I don’t know how else to cover a story except by being there,” Martin wrote in an email. “I would guess that 90 per cent of the stories I broke were a result of being in the hallways and visiting officials in their offices.”
“Not every official was glad to see me but dealing with them face to face, day in and day out, developed a level of trust on both sides. Sometimes relationships got tense but never acrimonious,” Martin wrote. “Even when [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] Colin Powell was yelling at me to get the hell out of his way, I knew I could go back and talk to him the next day.”
Martin’s first day on the job as CBS News Pentagon correspondent was April 18, 1983, the day a previously unknown terrorist group called Hezbollah blew up the American embassy in Beirut.
“Nobody knew it at the time, but that was the start of the age of terror,” Martin said.
“The next 40 years included the invasion of Grenada, Panama, the First Gulf War, the air war against Serbia, 9/11, the invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Bin Laden raid and the withdrawal from Afghanistan — not to mention all the cultural issues, like women in combat. I cannot imagine covering any of those stories without a building pass,” Martin wrote.
Bob Schieffer, the moderator of “Face the Nation” from 1991-2015, spent some of his first years at CBS News wearing a Pentagon pass.
“I came to work for CBS in 1969, and it was shortly after that, they just sent me out to the Pentagon because I was the rookie,” Schieffer said in a phone interview.
Schieffer was there for about six years and “loved it.”
“I’ll tell you what I loved about it — it was like covering a small town in the middle of a big city,” Schieffer said. “You could get information, and you know, most of the time, it was information that not only helped you, it helped the public understand.”
“They spend a lot of money at the Pentagon and rightly so, but I think people have a right to know about it, and not just get one public relations person who’s going to put out a press release.”
Currently, Charlie D’Agata is CBS News’ senior national security correspondent covering the Pentagon and brings over two decades of experience covering the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the U.S. military involvement in war zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria.
But it’s not just the correspondents on camera who are giving up their passes.
CBS News radio correspondent Cami McCormick has covered national security at CBS for over two decades. And teams of producers, camera operators, audio technicians and engineers crucial to bringing stories of the military to Americans across the country will also be turning in their passes.
The Pentagon says the intent of its new policy is to stop press leaks and exercise control over stories about the military reported by CBS News and other media organizations. It sent journalists a memo in September mandating they sign an agreement acknowledging they would need formal authorization to publish either classified or controlled unclassified information.
The department said in the memo that “information must be approved before public release … even if it is unclassified.” News organizations were given a deadline of 5 p.m. this past Tuesday to return the signed agreement. The vast majority declined to do so, though at least one outlet, the far-right One America News Network, agreed to the new restrictions.
CBS News Pentagon journalists may have turned in their credentials this week, but losing access to the building isn’t going to stop them from reporting what’s going on in what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth once promised would be “the most transparent administration ever.”
