Barbara Starr, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, changed majors three times in her first three months of college.

Burning with “post-high school idealism,” she set her cap for a sociology major and a career as a social worker. That changed to speech therapy. Then she landed in Journalism 101, and was hooked. As a reporter, she “could still do ‘good stuff’ but folks would actually pay me for…poking my nose in, and generally being a pest. What could be better?”

Starr was a Sundial reporter back when “students streaking on the quad” was a big story, and in her senior year won an internship at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle. Mentored by former Los Angeles Times labor writer Bob Baker ’70 (Journalism), then the Chronicle city editor, she covered the city planning commission and the real estate boom.

Baker “let me make mistakes and learn from them.” And she learned well; her internship turned into a paying job. At $8,000 per year, it was one of the best jobs she ever had. “Small town newspapers are disappearing, and sitting at your computer in your socks blogging away will never give you the experience of sitting in a small town newsroom,” she said. “Most days, I am still trying to turn out the same type of clear, clean, crisp copy as the folks I used to work with in community reporting.”

One of the worst days in American history thrust Starr into her broadcasting career. On September 11, 2001, she was working as ABC News’ Pentagon producer. “When the plane hit, the world, and my world, changed forever,” she said. Within weeks, Starr had become CNN’s Pentagon U.S. military correspondent. Since then, she has covered stories from Afghanistan and Iraq to East Africa and Beirut, from Hurricane Katrina to the Chinese-North Korean border.

“My greatest honor,” said Starr, “has been to report on stories of the troops and the young men and women who serve in dangerous places and far-off war zones. No matter how tough a day they are having, they always let us journalists tag along.”

But Hurricane Katrina was “more unsettling than any war zone experience.” A “story far beyond the powers of a blog or laptop computer,” only news cameras could convey its epic devastation, Starr said.

Visiting the CSUN campus a couple of years ago with her sister, Sandra Starr ’73 (Business), she marveled at how it has grown. A stop at the Oviatt Library brought back memories: for four years, Starr had been “the girl” at the information counter.

At CNN, she still deals with information, but in the years since she left the Oviatt, it has shifted from first gear to the “hyper-news cycle.” More than ever, said Starr, a lesson she learned from Bob Baker rings true: “It’s not enough to be accurate; you also have to be fair.”

— Julia Venkateswaran

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