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The Department of Defense announced that it's taking greater control over the newspaper Stars and Stripes. Supporters say the change threatens the paper's hard-won independence, which was granted by Congress more than 30 years ago. From WHRO in Norfolk, Virginia, Steve Walsh has this story.
STEVE WALSH, BYLINE: The staff at the military paper is waiting for answers after the Department of Defense announced last week on X that the Pentagon was taking a greater stake in the paper, eliminating so-called woke distractions.
ERIK SLAVIN: It's hard for me to say what we'll be able to do.
WALSH: That's Erik Slavin, the paper's editor-in-chief. The Pentagon has referred his staff to the social media post.
SLAVIN: From what has been printed so far, yeah, I'm concerned that stories that are not favorable to the administration in every which way will not be able to be done.
WALSH: Stars and Stripes won a Polk Award in 2010 for revealing that the Pentagon was secretly profiling journalists before allowing them to embed with troops in Afghanistan. But the paper's bread and butter are more recent stories that show military families struggling to afford off-base housing in Poland, military families stationed in Italy needing food stamps and a sexual assault case at Fort Bragg. Slavin says...
SLAVIN: If a reporter can't investigate claims and talk with the commands, the service members are going to lose something. They're going to lose an important forum.
WALSH: In his post, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell says Stars and Stripes will focus on war fighting, weapons systems, fitness and lethality. The Defense Department funds roughly half of the Stars and Stripes budget. Reporters and editors are civilian staff at the Defense Department, though after the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, Congress mandated the paper remain independent. Lawmakers created an ombudsman that reports directly to them, says the paper's current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith. She is working on a report to lawmakers.
JACQUELINE SMITH: The military community and veterans have to be able to trust that what they're reading is unfiltered. It is not from a public relations viewpoint, and it does not have a spin. It is from trained journalists who are giving a balanced report. And Stripes does that. I - you know, I monitor it every day.
WALSH: Stars and Stripes started in the Civil War. It was revived in World War I, brought back during World War II and has been published ever since. The first Trump administration nearly shut it down. In 2020, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper cut the paper from the Pentagon's budget. After a bipartisan outcry, the decision was reversed after President Trump tweeted the paper should stay open. Robert Reid was the paper's senior managing editor at the time. He says this effort feels different.
ROBERT REID: This is a planned strategy developed over a period of time by very knowledgeable lawyers who have found a far more solid legal basis for dealing with Stars and Stripes than Secretary Esper did.
WALSH: The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond to our request for comment. It also comes after a number of moves, including forcing the press corps to sign a pledge that led to nearly all of the traditional press corps to leave the Pentagon in November, says Denny Watkins, a former Navy officer who teaches journalism at Elmhurst University.
DENNY WATKINS: It does seem to be all part of a concerted and multipronged attack against independent news reporting in the United States.
WALSH: Having been a part of the target audience, Watkins says the real losers will be the troops who no longer have a real newspaper of their own.
For NPR News, I'm Steve Walsh.
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