Pentagon Purge Silences 160-Year Voice

A newspaper that survived the Civil War, two world wars, and decades of Pentagon budget fights just lost its top editor for saying the paper shouldn’t take orders from the building that funds it.

Story Snapshot

The Pentagon fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte on August 21 for insubordination, days after publisher Max Lederer announced his retirement over “fundamental” disagreements with the Defense Department.
Slavin says he was targeted for telling CBS that any hypothetical censorship of news for troops would be a “red line” he wouldn’t cross.
The firings follow a March memo restricting the paper from using wire services like the Associated Press and dropping comics, plus the April dismissal of the paper’s congressionally created ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell says the changes will “refocus” the paper on warfighting and “ALL THINGS MILITARY,” cutting what he called “repurposed DC gossip columns.”

A 160-Year-Old Newsroom Loses Its Leadership In One Week

The Pentagon handed separation notices to Erik Slavin and Lara Korte on a Friday in late August, citing insubordination. Both had spoken publicly against Defense Department interference in the newsroom.

Slavin said he stands by the principle that Stars and Stripes must stay editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies. He believes the CBS interview sealed his fate.

Publisher Max Lederer had already announced plans to retire after 19 years running the paper. He said that his “philosophy of leadership” and his understanding of the paper’s mission differed in fundamental ways from the Defense Department’s vision for where it wanted to take the organization. Reporter Lara Korte, covering the Middle East, confirmed she was let go the same day as Slavin and Lederer.

The Paper’s Independence Was Built Into Federal Law

Stars and Stripes has operated since the Civil War under a federal regulation requiring it to stay “objective, credible, and editorially independent of the military chain of command”.

Congress even created an ombudsman position in 1991 specifically to guard that independence and report problems directly to lawmakers, bypassing Pentagon management entirely.

That structure made the paper unusual among government-funded outlets, and it’s exactly what critics say the Pentagon has now dismantled.

The Pentagon has fired three employees of Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper partly funded by taxpayers that has long operated with editorial independence, citing insubordination. Publisher Max Lederer, Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, and Reporter Lara Korte all said that… pic.twitter.com/4Nkl0w1rWS

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 23, 2026

An eight-page Pentagon memo dated March 9 formally asserted new oversight while claiming to preserve independence. The memo barred wire service content from outlets and pulled comic strips from the paper’s pages.

Parnell described the goal on social media as making the paper “custom tailored to our warfighters,” focused on “weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability” instead of general-interest material.

The Watchdog Fired Before Anyone Else

Jacqueline Smith held that congressionally protected ombudsman job until April, when the Pentagon dismissed her without stating a reason. Her separation notice simply listed her last day, five days out, as required.

Smith wrote that the firing came “in the coldest way possible” and said she believed it followed her public criticism of the paper’s new restrictions. She had specifically called out the removal of comic strips as evidence of unlawful content control.

Smith later told interviewers the March memo amounted to “censorship” and “controlling what the troops can read”. Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling publicly backed that concern, warning that squeezing independent reporting out of a paper troops rely on overseas could push service members toward less reliable sources and hurt morale.

PEN America added that the Pentagon had already labeled the outlet “woke” in January, before announcing the subsequent changes.

Why This Fight Matters Beyond One Newsroom

The Pentagon insists Stars and Stripes remains editorially independent even as it tightens control over content and staffing. That contradiction sits at the center of the dispute. A federal lawsuit filed in June accuses the department of censorship through these editorial restrictions.

Whatever a court eventually decides, the pattern is now unmistakable: an ombudsman fired, a publisher who chose to leave, and an editor removed for defending the very independence Congress wrote into law.

Troops overseas have depended on Stars and Stripes for generations precisely because it wasn’t just another Pentagon press release. Turning it into one, even gradually, changes what service members can trust when they pick it up. That’s not a management footnote. It’s the whole point of why Congress protected this paper in the first place.