Stars and Stripes has a front page like no other. On a day when the headlines on other newspapers were dominated by earthquakes in Venezuela and Supreme Court decisions on immigration, Erik Slavin, the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, put out a newspaper for the American military, with stories about new tactics involving drones, and service members and families facing food insecurity. “We want to go with something that we know will directly interest our readers right away,” Slavin said.
The newspaper is part of the Department of Defense, and its reporters are Pentagon employees. But it has long maintained editorial independence from the top brass. “We’re trying to provide independent news for the military community,” Slavin said.
An average of 1.4 million people see Stars and Stripes each day – mostly online, although it still puts out a print version overseas, for service members in remote places where access to the internet can be unreliable.
First published during the Civil War, Stars and Stripes was revived in World War I under General John “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of American troops in Europe.
“It was General Pershing who said, we need a paper for American troops overseas, so they know what is going on and have a sense of why they’re fighting,” said Catherine Giordano. Earlier this year, Giordano, then the archivist of Stars and Stripes, showed us what Pershing had in mind. His message to readers: “The paper, written by the men in the service, should speak the thoughts of the New American Army and American people from whom the Army has been drawn. It is your paper. Good luck to it.”
The paper has been published continuously since World War II, heralded as representing “the free thought and free expression of a free people.”
But this past January, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted this on X: “We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century. We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale…”
Asked what he understood “woke distractions” to mean, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin replied, “I really don’t know what they were referring to, because they didn’t explain it.”
In June Star and Stripes published a story about upcoming European concerts by the rapper Bad Bunny, whose Super Bowl halftime show was panned by President Trump as “one of the worst ever.” Lara Korte, the reporter who wrote that story, covers the Middle East for Stars and Stripes.
Asked how that story related to the military, Korte (who is based in Germany) said, “We have a lot of people who are newly stationed here overseas. They want to find interesting trips to take. They want to have fun.
“I’m working for Stars and Stripes,” she added, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”
At the same time Parnell’s social media post appeared, the Pentagon rescinded a federal regulation directing that Stars and Stripes operate “without news management or censorship.” Then came a March 2026 memo signed by the deputy secretary of defense. Subject line: “Modernization of Stars and Stripes Operations.” According to Slavin, while the memo asserted the paper’s independence, at the same time it placed new restrictions on what the paper could do. “We were barred from running comics, and we were no longer to run news from paid wire services as well,” he said.
That meant no more news stories from the Associated Press, which was temporarily banned from the Oval Office for refusing to go along with changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. What the restrictions meant, Slavin said, was that, “It’s more difficult for us to cover breaking news.”
Two members of the paper’s advisory board have filed a lawsuit accusing the Defense Department of violating the First Amendment. [The Pentagon declined CBS News’ request for an interview, citing ongoing litigation.]
“By having a government agency say, ‘You cannot print this,’ it’s the beginning of saying more – ‘You cannot print that,’ or ‘You must print this.’ It’s editorial control,” said Jacqueline Smith, the paper’s former ombudsman, a kind of editorial watchdog. In April, Smith wrote a column which began, “Pete Hegseth doesn’t want you to see cartoons in this newspaper anymore.”
She admits she was “poking the bear, in a way, but I had not at all expected that retaliation.”
Two weeks later, Smith was fired.
Stars and Stripes has poked bears before, most famously with the cartoons of Bill Mauldin during World War II, depicting enlisted men as unshaven, muddy, wrinkled, even slovenly. “These were the kinds of cartoons that Mauldin drew that soldiers loved because it depicted how war was,” said Giordano.
But the legendary General George Patton despised Mauldin’s work. “He tried to have the paper banned, because he wanted crisp and spiffy-looking military men,” Giordano said.
General Eisenhower, who would remain a reader as president, sided with Mauldin, and wrote a letter to Patton telling him not to interfere.
Eighty years later, with missiles flying in the Middle East, Lara Korte keeps showing up on the front page with stories like one about the plight of military families evacuated from the Persian Gulf. “I do not feel any constraint,” said Korte. “I don’t feel like I’ve been stopped from covering any specific story.”
But, asked if she feels the final shoe has dropped, Korte replied, “I do feel like there could be more to come.”
Jacqueline Smith, the former ombudsman, said she worries that “the endgame is turning Stars and Stripes into a public affairs propaganda machine.”
Smith, who has filed a lawsuit challenging her firing, points to this passage in the Pentagon memo: “Stripes content must be consistent with good order and discipline of the military.” “That’s a phrase used in military court martials,” she said. “They could say anything is against ‘good conduct.'”
Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin (who has a sign near his desk reading “Pick your battles”) views that as potentially compromising the paper’s mission. He may have to choose between his allegiance to the First Amendment, and his obligation to obey Pentagon orders.
Asked if he had any red lines he would not cross, Slavin replied, “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story, run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon. That would be a red line.”
And what fox hole might he be willing to die in? “We need to be able to provide independent news to service members,” Slavin said. “If we can’t do that, if we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations? Yeah, that’s the foxhole.”
In this web exclusive, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft talks with CBS News national security correspondent David Martin about his start in journalism as a reporter for Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon’s newspaper for members of the military, and how his early days covering the war in Vietnam influenced his career at CBS.
Story produced by Robert Marston and Mary Walsh. Editor: Chad Cardin.
