For more than a century, the newspaper Stars and Stripes has published stories of deep interest to troops and their families, but often a bit niche for the mainstream press.
In recent years, articles have delved into everything from black mold in military housing to child neglect in base day care centers to U.S. agreements with host countries that thwart military spouses’ ability to work. The paper’s reporting has also sparked questions about the Pentagon’s managerial competence.
Partially funded by the Department of Defense (DOD), the soldier-produced daily has long operated free from Pentagon censorship. Until now.
Why We Wrote This
The independent paper Stars and Stripes has informed and spoken for American troops for a century. A Trump administration move raises concerns that a voice for service members is at risk.
Last week, the Trump administration announced plans to exert control over the newspaper to “refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members,” Pentagon press secretary Sean Parnell said in a social media post.
Going forward, the newspaper will “be custom tailored to our warfighter” with a focus on “war fighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY.’’
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for whom Mr. Parnell serves as an adviser, reposted the announcement.
The move has raised questions about the newspaper’s independence and how its service to a largely military audience may change. While much of the paper’s reporting covers sports and daily life on-base, Stars and Stripes articles have spurred lawsuits against the Defense Department and calls for improved oversight in matters that tend to affect low-ranking troops the most.
The paper has not just informed American troops over the years. It has also spoken for them, advocates say. The Trump administration’s announcement, as a result, is prompting concerns that service members could be denied the support such reporting provides.
“The people who risk their lives in defense of the Constitution have earned the right to the press freedoms of the First Amendment,” Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin wrote in a note to Stars and Stripes staffers last week.
“No censorship”
Stars and Stripes dates back to the start of the Civil War, in 1861, when 10 journalists serving as Union soldiers came across a printing press and decided to publish a four-page issue with an editorial that spoke candidly about the losses of war. “We should all remember that we have not started out to destroy a country,” it read, “but to save one.”
The newspaper soon halted publication, but it was relaunched in 1918 during World War I by Gen. John Pershing, who envisioned a newspaper that “should speak the thoughts of the new American Army and the American people from whom the Army has been drawn. It is your paper,” he wrote on the front page of the first issue of the war. “Good luck to it.”
During World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted Stars and Stripes to be “the equivalent of a soldier’s hometown newspaper, with no censorship of its contents, other than for security,” he wrote.
The late CBS commentator Andy Rooney, a Stars and Stripes reporter during his time in the U.S. Army, recalled in a broadcast that Eisenhower “made it possible for us to be a good newspaper by protecting us from every petty major, colonel, or brigadier general who tried to influence the content of our paper.”
When Gen. George Patton objected to a Bill Mauldin cartoon that lampooned him – demanding the artist soldier be fired and sent back to the infantry – Eisenhower told him “to mind his own business,” recalled Mr. Rooney, who interviewed Eisenhower frequently while covering the war.
A battle for control
The Trump administration tried to shut down the newspaper in 2020, during the president’s first term. But the move was met with protest, including from a bipartisan group of senators who called the publication “an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom.”
“As a veteran who has served overseas, I know the value that the Stars and Stripes brings to its readers,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, wrote in a 2020 letter to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, protesting Pentagon plans to defund the publication.
President Trump then reversed course and weighed in, tweeting that the United States would not be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes “under my watch.”
The $15.5 million in federal money makes up roughly half the newspaper’s operating budget, with the other half coming from subscriptions and advertising. The paper, free to deployed service members, reportedly serves nearly 1 million customers daily through its print, online, and podcast editions.
This time around, while some Democrats, namely those on the Senate Armed Services Committee, denounced the administration’s move as a First Amendment violation, Republican criticism has been muted.
A new question for applicants
Mr. Parnell’s announcement came a day after The Washington Post reported that job applicants at the newspaper are now being asked on the government’s employment website how they would “advance” President Trump’s policies, should they be hired.
The director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, which runs the site, told the Post that answering that question is optional. But U.S. officials suggest, in the wake of Mr. Parnell’s announcement, that a revamped Stars and Stripes will focus on amplifying the administration’s messages. Roughly half of the new content on the Stars and Stripes website is expected to be “War Department-generated materials,” according to defense officials cited in The Daily Wire, a conservative media outlet.
This threatens the independence of the Stars and Stripes, says Kelly McBride, chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that specializes in the practice of journalism.
“The publication has made a promise to its audience that it will cover the military with the needs of the people who serve and their families at the forefront,’’ she says. The priority is not “to promote the policies of the administration.’’
One possible speed bump for the Trump administration’s move is that Stars and Stripes has an ombudsman whose job is reporting any threat to its independence to Congress, a position created in 1991 by the House Armed Services Committee. That ombudsman is currently in contact with lawmakers and others on Capitol Hill, Editor-in-Chief Slavin tells the Monitor.
“At this point, they [administration officials] have not reached out to us directly to discuss this,” he says. When Stars and Stripes reporters contacted defense officials in recent days to ask about the administration’s move for editorial control, they were referred to Mr. Parnell’s social media post, he adds.
In the meantime, “We continue to do our jobs. … We report on the military at a very granular level,” covering stories that might otherwise go unexamined, Mr. Slavin says.
These include pieces on the high price of off-base housing for U.S. soldiers stationed in Poland, working conditions for sailors on U.S. Navy ships, and students with military parents protesting the removal of books from DOD-run school library shelves (an issue also covered by the Monitor.) The book removals were part of Secretary Hegseth’s latest efforts to dial back attentiveness to diversity, which he says threatens warfighting unity.
Many of the Stars and Stripes articles are notable for the access reporters often have when they live and work in military communities.
“Nobody else is going to write those stories,” Mr. Slavin says. “But we do, because we know our readers care.”
