Stars and Stripes has been publishing since 1861. It survived the Civil War, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It could not survive Donald Trump’s Pentagon.
Publisher Max Lederer, who held the job for 19 years, and editor Erik Slavin received termination notices on Friday. The charge was insubordination. Reporter Lara Korte got the same treatment. Their offense, stripped of bureaucratic language, was telling the truth in public.
Slavin told the Associated Press he was fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” Korte was fired for telling CBS that she worked for Stars and Stripes, not “the Pentagon, any administration, or any policy maker.” These are statements of basic journalistic principle. In this Pentagon, they are fireable offenses.
The dismissals landed days after Stars and Stripes reported on crew conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier limping toward San Diego after an extended Middle East deployment tied to the war in Iran that Trump launched in February alongside Israel. Veteran and military health experts raised concerns. Trump waved them off, saying the crew’s deployment had been “not nearly long enough.” So the carrier’s sailors get dismissed concerns, and the reporters who told their story get dismissal notices.
This is not an isolated purge. It is a pattern. Ombudsman Jacqueline Smith was fired in January after writing critically about Pentagon press restrictions the Trump administration sought. She sued, alleging retaliation. The Pentagon has been warring with the press corps that covers it, demanding journalists stop seeking confidential sources, pushing reporters to surrender their access badges rather than comply. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted a pledge to bring Stars and Stripes “into the 21st century” by refocusing its content “away from woke distractions that syphon morale.” Read that twice. A government spokesperson, on a public platform, announced plans to reshape a news outlet’s coverage to align with political ideology. That is not modernization. That is state media.
Foto-AG Melle (CC BY-SA 3.0 de) via Wikimedia CommonsThe Pentagon funds about 65% of Stars and Stripes’ budget. That funding arrangement was always a tension. Lederer understood it. In a letter to staff, he wrote that his understanding of the publication’s “value and mission” differed “in fundamental ways from the direction of the leadership of the Department of Defense.” He was scheduled to retire in September. They could not wait nine weeks. They wanted him gone before he could leave on his own terms, and they wanted every remaining editor and reporter to understand the message.
Stars and Stripes reaches 1.4 million readers daily, online and in overseas print editions. Those readers are service members and their families, people who swore an oath to defend a Constitution whose First Amendment guarantees a free press. The Pentagon is betting that those service members would rather have sanitized press releases than honest reporting about the conditions they live and work in. That bet is an insult to every person in uniform.
Slavin told CBS in July that the “foxhole” he would die in was editorial independence. “If we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations? Yeah, that’s the foxhole.” He is now out of a job for saying so. Korte called it “a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.” She is right, and the shame belongs entirely to the people who fired her.
What must happen now is not silence. Congress holds the Pentagon’s purse strings, and Stars and Stripes exists because lawmakers chose to fund it. Every member of the armed services committees, every representative who has ever voted for that funding, owes the public a position on whether a military newspaper should be gutted for reporting facts. The journalists fired this week have five days to appeal. The rest of us have longer than that, but not much. A press that cannot report on crew conditions on a Navy carrier is not a press. It is a propaganda arm with a 164-year head start on credibility, and the Pentagon is counting on that credibility to survive the conversion.
Do not let it.