The Pentagon moved to modernize Stars and Stripes in January and then tightened the paper’s operations in a March memo that, according to one of its reporters, barred comics and paid wire-service news. The changes landed on a military newspaper that still reaches an average of 1.4 million people a day.
That makes the timing matter. Stars and Stripes still prints overseas for service members in remote places where internet access can be unreliable, and the paper’s audience is not an abstract one: it is the military community that depends on it for news, features and the kind of coverage that can travel with them.
Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, had already signaled the shift in January when he posted that the department was bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century and would modernize its operations while moving the paper away from what he called woke distractions that syphon morale. Erik Slavin, who has reported on the memo, says the paper is still trying to do the opposite — provide independent news for the military community.
The March memo, titled Modernization of Stars and Stripes Operations, is where that promise met the fine print. Slavin said it preserved the paper’s independence on paper while also setting new limits on what it could publish, and he said the memo’s reach went beyond the two restrictions already described. He also said he did not know what the Pentagon meant by woke distractions because it never explained the phrase.
That gap matters because Stars and Stripes has spent generations defining itself against command control. It was first published during the Civil War, revived in World War I under John “Black Jack” Pershing, and has been published continuously since World War II. Pershing said the paper should speak the thoughts of the New American Army and the American people from whom the Army had been drawn, a mission that still hangs over the newsroom even as the Pentagon says it wants to update the operation.
Lara Korte illustrated the paper’s current logic in June, when she wrote about upcoming European concerts by Bad Bunny and said the story mattered because many people were newly stationed overseas and wanted interesting trips to take. She said, in effect, that she works for Stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration and not for any policymaker, but for the military community.
The unanswered question now is not whether the Pentagon wants change. It already does. It is how far the new rules will go, and whether a newspaper built to speak to service members can keep that voice if more of its newsroom decisions start coming from the very department it covers.
