OAN's Pentagon reporter learns the limits of expressing her own opinion
Assigned to cover the Pentagon for the conservative outlet One America News Network, Gabrielle Cuccia didn't pretend to be an unbiased reporter. She describes herself as 'a MAGA girl' who is unapologetically defiant in her support of President Donald Trump.
Yet days after publicly criticizing a Trump appointee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Cuccia found herself out of a job.
In taking to Substack last week to express a personal opinion about a figure she covers, Cuccia did something that would be frowned upon in many legacy newsrooms. The message that she was sent, however, is most likely to resound in places where opinion is fine — but only a certain variety.
Cuccia's lengthy Substack post, 'The Secretary of Defense-ive,' was posted three days after Hegseth issued new rules that banned reporters from accessing large areas of the Pentagon without being watched by his minders.
She criticized him for limiting freedom of movement in the name of national security.
Cuccia praises responsible Pentagon reporters
'The Pentagon wants to paint a picture that journalists are freely roaming classified spaces, sneaking into (secure areas), and leaking top-secret information,' she wrote. 'And that is simply not true. There are security cameras everywhere, protocols in place and quite frankly, it would be painfully obvious if a reporter was in a space they didn't belong.'
Cuccia said the real leaks from the Pentagon have come from Hegseth's own team and other senior officials. Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, was embarrassed in March when The Atlantic magazine's editor-in-chief was mistakenly included in a Signal chat in which the defense secretary discussed upcoming military strikes.
She criticized Hegseth for not yet holding a media briefing at the Pentagon.
'The Commander-in-Chief welcomes the hard questions ... and yes, even the dumb ones,' she wrote. 'Why won't the Secretary of Defense do the same?'
Three days after her Memorial Day Substack post, Cuccia said her Pentagon access badge was revoked. 'By Friday," she said, 'I was out of a job.'
The Defense Department did not pull Cuccia's credentials, according to a Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues. Cuccia said OAN told her the Substack piece had been 'put on their radar,' but she wouldn't say by who. She wouldn't speak further about what her employer told her, and OAN president Charles Herring told The Associated Press that it does not discuss personnel issues.
'When a reporter asks inconvenient questions about government overreach, the response should be accountability — not silence, and certainly not separation,' Cuccia said.
Traditionally, the legacy media does not want its journalists expressing opinions about people they cover, since it calls into doubt their ability to report without bias. But exceptions are often made in cases where media access is at issue, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.
The New York Times, for example, institutionally called upon Joe Biden to meet more often with journalists when he was president. The Pentagon Press Association said Hegseth's restrictions were a direct assault on the freedom of the press.
Making no secret of allegiance to Trump
One America News Network makes no secret of its allegiance to Trump. When Matt Gaetz's nomination as Trump's attorney general fell apart following the election, OAN quickly signed him up as a contributor. OAN faced lawsuits — and negotiated settlements — for its promotion of Trump's false theories that he did not lose the 2020 election.
When Hegseth earlier this year evicted several news organizations from their Pentagon workspaces and gave more room to friendly outlets, Cuccia was assigned space formerly held by NBC News. Before Hegseth aide Sean Parnell's only media briefing, Cuccia said Hegseth's team reached out to her in advance to find out what questions she wanted to ask, something that would never be done for most media outlets.
If OAN is responsible for removing Cuccia, it's a 'take no quarter position,' Rosenstiel said. 'There is no room, if you're on the team, to say anything that is negative.'
He said he'd be interested to see if any representatives from pro-Trump media outlets defend her. 'Are they silent, or do they rally to her in any way?' he asked. Trump, in the past, has frequently criticized Fox News Channel for saying anything on the air that he deemed negative.
Part of Cuccia's Substack post sounded almost prescient about what might happen to her, when she reminisced about the energy of the early Make America Great Again movement. Questioning government then, she noted, was a point of pride.
'Somewhere along the way, we as a collective decided — if anyone ever questioned a policy or person within the MAGA movement — that they weren't MAGA enough," she wrote. "That they were deep state, that they couldn't be trusted, that they didn't love America as much as we do and that ... to put it bluntly, they sucked.'
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