The Associated Press has covered the firings of the newspaper’s publisher, editor- in-chief, ombudsman, and a senior reporter in detail in their 21 August story. The Hill calls DOD’s move “part of Trump’s war on Media and Military News reports that the newspaper’s editor-in-chief says the Pentagon fired them for “insubordination.”
Stars and Stripes has long been protected by a Congressional mandate and a DOD directive stating: “There shall be a free flow of news and information to its readership without news management or censorship,” but the current regime has voided a long-standing policy published in the Federal Register that requires an independent ombudsman be a “highly qualified journalist hired from outside the Department of Defense.”
The Pentagon is claiming it will “refocus” Stars and Stripes content and signaled that change was afoot in January of this year when DOD’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, posted on X, “The Department of War is returning Stars & Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters. We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century. We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.”
A time-proven tool of autocrats has been to co-opt news outlets and convert them to tools in the propaganda machine, which appears to be underway at a long-reliable and independent source of factual information for our Active Service Members.
Read the Associated Press coverage of this story HERE.
