The Pentagon’s War Against Stars and Stripes

The Trump administration increased its attacks on press freedom last week when the Department of Defense fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte from the 165-year-old news outlet serving the U.S. military community. The outgoing editor told The Washington Post that he and Korte were given separation notices on Friday, following their participation in a CBS News interview about Pentagon interference with their work. According to Slavin, “Pentagon public affairs has deemed that insubordination.”

The move was not exactly a bolt out of the blue. In recent weeks, Stars and Stripes had been publicly in the sights of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for its reporting on dire conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln amid a long deployment, plummeting morale and resupply problems. Even as far back as January, CBS reported, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell had posted on X , “We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century. We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale.”

Toward this end, in April, the Pentagon rescinded federal protections that allowed the paper to operate “without news management or censorship,” and restricted the paper from running comics or wire service reports. Hegseth celebrated the changes as steps toward realizing his goal of eliminating “woke distractions” in the paper. When the publication’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, criticized the changes in a column, she was promptly fired.

In June, Smith and members of the paper’s advisory board filed separate First Amendment lawsuits against the Defense Department. According to The Washington Post, Smith is alleging that “that her dismissal was retaliatory and violated her First Amendment rights,” while the board members’ suit claims that the recent statutory changes are in violation of “the First Amendment’s press freedom guarantees, as well as federal administrative law.” (Neither Slavin nor Korte has taken legal action over their recent firings.)

Stars and Stripes was originally founded by Union troops during the Civil War and has thrived under a congressional mandate to operate under the principles of the First Amendment, free of influence from any part of the chain of command. This was reinforced during World War II, when Gen. George Patton threatened to throw editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin in jail over a cartoon making fun of him, only to be overruled by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, who reportedly said, “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ newspaper. We will not interfere.”

This independence has allowed the paper to produce numerous exposes on the military and the lives of enlisted men and women and their families. In 2010, Stars and Stripes won a George Polk Award for a series on how the Pentagon was profiling reporters who had applied to embed with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. A recent op-ed piece at the media-focused website Poynter recounts the impact of stories on topics including “GI benefits, military pay increases, [and] the restaurants at Ramstein Air Base”:

Almost every year, at least one story from Stars and Stripes is among the journalism honored by the Military Reporters & Editors, a professional association. Often, the stories are about failures or rules that unfairly harm those who serve or their families.

In 2024, Stars and Stripes exposed a bureaucratic practice that plagues thousands of veterans , making it appear as if they have a pending criminal charge when, in fact, their cases were investigated and charges were not filed.

In 2022, it was a story about arcane rules that prevent spouses from working while stationed in Italy.

For decades, Stars and Stripes has been a vital part of the journalistic ecosystem covering the U.S. military, specifically serving the 1.3 million active-duty troops, their families and millions more retired service members.

The staff of Stars and Stripes continued this tradition with its reporting on the dismal conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the dire crew morale. The crackdown that reporting accelerated is further confirmation that the Trump administration is a sworn enemy of the very constitutional principles that the military, in theory, exists to protect.

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