By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
The Department of Defense has a bold new vision for Stars and Stripes, the 160-year-old newspaper that reports on the U.S. military. The vision is simple: fewer facts, more flags.
For decades, the paper operated under a strange, stubborn law. Congress said it, though partly funded by the Pentagon, must run like a real newspaper, governed by the First Amendment and free of “news management or censorship.” That worked fine as long as nobody in charge minded reading true things about the military. That arrangement recently expired.
In January, a Pentagon spokesman announced the paper would be “refocused” to eliminate “woke distractions,” a term nobody defined. In March, a new memo confirmed the paper’s editorial independence in one sentence and quietly took it away in the next. Content now had to align with “good order and discipline,” a phrase borrowed from military law that has never once produced an award-winning investigation.
Then came the test. This summer, reporter Lara Korte covered deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during its extended Middle East deployment—exactly the story the paper exists to write, the kind of accountability journalism that gets a carrier’s plumbing fixed. Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, asked by CBS whether he would accept censorship of news for troops, called that a “red line.” Korte told the same interviewer she works for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon.
Reader, that was the insubordination. Last Friday, the Pentagon fired Slavin, fired Korte, and fired publisher Max Lederer, who had already announced his retirement—not fast enough for some people. The notice cited the CBS interview itself as the offense. Saying censorship is bad is now a firing offense at the newspaper whose charter forbids censorship, like firing the fire department for insisting fire is hot. Lederer’s own farewell memo put it more politely: His “philosophy of leadership” no longer matched the Pentagon’s direction. They wanted a newsletter, and he kept insisting on a newspaper.
Give the Pentagon credit for consistency. The stated goal—protect morale, avoid “adversely affecting national security”—sounds reasonable until you notice governments have used it since the printing press to keep uncomfortable stories from the people paying for them. The sailors did not develop plumbing problems because a reporter wrote about them; they had the problems first. Remove the reporter and the pipes are still broken. You have just made sure Washington hears about it later, and pricier.
There is a useful comparison next door. The Military Times papers—Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, Marine Corps Times—are privately owned, not funded by the Pentagon, and answer to no defense secretary. Most enlisted troops admit they skip them anyway, since the audience skews toward officers and retirees. But nobody is firing their editors for saying “censorship” out loud, because nobody funds them into obedience. Stars and Stripes was supposed to have that same shield, bought not with private ownership but with a promise from Congress. This month showed what that promise is worth once the man holding the purse decides he would rather hold the pen too.
The Pentagon insists the paper remains editorially independent—in the very memo that expanded its own oversight of it. You can believe in the free press or believe it should stop reporting things that embarrass you. Not both, honestly.
Even the lawyers are underwhelmed, in the most lawyerly way possible. Back in June, two Pulitzer-winning journalists on the paper’s advisory board sued the Pentagon, and the sharpest argument they could find was not the First Amendment—it was paperwork. The suit says the Pentagon yanked the independence rule out of the federal code without the legally required public comment period, the same procedure you would need to change how the Post Office sorts mail. A cabinet department tried to dismantle press freedom for a paper of record, and the cleanest way to catch it in court was a filing deadline it skipped. The Pentagon called the case “without merit,” which is what every losing team says the week before the game.
So here is the new Stars and Stripes: 50 percent staff-written stories about warfighters, zero percent about the plumbing they live with, a masthead that turns over every time someone on it remembers what a newspaper is for, and now a docket of lawsuits it can’t cover because it fired the people who would have covered it. Support the troops, the saying goes. Just do not ask the troops’ newspaper what that looks like below deck, or in court.
Why This Should Bother Everyone, Not Just Reporters
Here is the part that is not funny. Stars and Stripes exists because Congress decided, after Iran-Contra, that troops deserved the truth about their own government, unflattering or not. That is a founding idea, not a partisan one. A citizen in uniform does not stop being a citizen, and a democracy that only tells its soldiers good news is not informing them, it is managing them. The people who need the most independent press are those farthest from home, with the fewest sources and the most at stake in their leadership’s decisions. Take that away and you have not protected morale. You have made sure the next bad decision goes unreported until it is a scandal.
What Readers Can Actually Do
This fight is not settled, and it is not abstract.
· Call your senators before you call anyone else. The House already passed its defense bill without Stars and Stripes protections, after a committee amendment to add them failed by four votes. The Senate version, with editorial-independence language from Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Richard Blumenthal, hasn’t even reached the floor—it is stuck on a procedural vote unrelated to the paper. Nothing gets conferenced, let alone protected, until senators break that logjam.
· Ask Congress to restore the ombudsman by statute, not custom—the official the Pentagon fired whose entire job was reporting editorial interference to lawmakers.
· Subscribe or keep reading Stars and Stripes and say so. Readership numbers get cited by both sides as proof the paper does or does not matter. Showing up as a reader is pressure.
· Write your own letter or column, as you are reading now. Public pressure already pushed lawmakers of both parties to demand answers. More of that keeps the story alive.
None of this requires a uniform or a press badge. It requires deciding that a newspaper built for soldiers should not have to fight this hard just to keep telling them the truth.
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Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.
When it was still an indepedent newspaper, the Stars and Stripes reported extensively in 1969 on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam with follow-up articles on the court martials of its perpetrators.