By Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON, Aug 21 (Reuters) – The editor-in-chief of the Stars and Stripes U.S. military newspaper said on Friday that he was being fired for insubordination and Reuters learned that the Pentagon had sent notices to the paper’s leadership informing them that they would be let go.
“According to the notice, I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a personal red line,” Erik Slavin said in a statement.
In an email to staff seen by Reuters, the newspaper’s Europe and Middle East bureau chief, William Gallo, noted that Slavin, along with longtime publisher Max Lederer and another reporter had received termination notices.
“We all have questions about what things will look like moving forward… I am still here, and you are still here. And we will continue to do independent journalism, in accordance with our legal mandate,” Gallo wrote.
Lederer was set to retire at the end of September.
In his email this week announcing his retirement, Lederer wrote that it was clear that the Pentagon had a new vision for the newspaper that was different from his own.
Lara Korte, who covered the Middle East for the newspaper, said on social media on Friday that she had been fired. She said it was because she had told CBS News that she works for Stars and Stripes and not the Pentagon.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Stars and Stripes, which has published a newspaper continuously since World War Two and provides news to U.S. troops around the world, receives funding from the Defense Department but has historically been editorially independent. But the Pentagon, under U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has sought to take greater control over the newspaper.
Earlier this year, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department would “modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that siphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.”
The Pentagon recently appointed a military deputy to the publisher for the newspaper. In a post on X on Friday, Parnell quoted from an open letter the military deputy had written.
“We may never be able to have the same impact for our service members digitally that our paper had during World War II in a vastly different media environment, but I also believe that we can do better — that we must do better for our most important constituency, the men and women who make up the U.S. Armed Forces,” the letter said.
In his first administration, President Donald Trump reversed a decision by the Pentagon to shut down the newspaper altogether.
Press freedom advocates have criticized broader policy changes under the Trump administration that have limited journalists’ access to the Pentagon, saying they suppressed freedom of speech.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Saad Sayeed)
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