Last month, as the U.S. and Iran’s temporary ceasefire teetered on the brink of collapse, Erik Slavin was sitting in his office at the Pentagon when he was asked a question. After months of pressure from Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department, what would constitute a “red line” for the Stars and Stripes editor in chief?
“Don’t run a perfectly accurate story, run this instead,” he told CBS News correspondent David Martin. “Here it is, written by the Pentagon. That would be a red line.”
On Friday, the Pentagon fired Slavin from his role overseeing the military newspaper that has continuously published reporting for America’s servicemembers since World War II for uttering those very words.
“They cited the CBS interview and said I was insubordinate for responding to a hypothetical about censorship and saying it was a red line,” Slavin told CNN’s Erin Burnett hours after he was terminated. “In my mind, I reaffirmed what the law says, what the DOD regs say, which is that Stars and Stripes is meant to be free of news management and censorship.”
The newspaper has “historically been free of military interference. That’s the standard that was put into place by General Dwight Eisenhower during World War II, and we’ve always been proud of that, to reaffirm that standard and report for service members and their families,” he added.
And Slavin wasn’t alone. Defense Department officials also fired the longtime Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, who had recently announced his retirement after clashing with Hegseth’s lieutenants, as well as Middle East reporter Lara Korte, who had reported on the impact of Trump’s war with Iran on military families. “Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes—not the Pentagon, not any administration, and not any policy maker,” Korte wrote on social media.
The abrupt firings of the paper’s leadership marked the culmination of Hegseth’s attempts to undermine and contort the newspaper, which is staffed by civilians and has long enjoyed editorial independence, into what it clearly hopes will be a mouthpiece of the Trump administration. And the Pentagon had already shown it is willing to punish those who challenged its efforts to reshape the paper.
In April, it fired Stars and Stripes ombudsman Jacqueline Smith, who had publicly warned that the department’s new policies threatened the newspaper’s editorial independence. Smith, whose three-year term was not set to expire until December, said she was given no explanation for her dismissal. She has since sued the Pentagon, alleging that her firing violated her First Amendment rights.
Smith’s firing comes amid a broader war on press freedoms at Hegseth’s Pentagon, as Status has previously reported. Defense officials have booted news organizations out of the building and replaced them with MAGA Media sycophants; imposed new rules requiring journalists to agree not to seek or report information that has not been explicitly authorized for release; restricted reporters’ ability to move through the building without an escort; designated the press office as classified and off-limits; and made press briefings increasingly rare despite ongoing military offensives.
But things weren’t always this way. During World War II, Eisenhower famously defended the paper’s independence. “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ newspaper. We will not interfere,” Eisenhower said. That tradition eventually became formal policy: Congress and the Defense Department established protections requiring the newspaper to operate as an independent publication with First Amendment protections, free from outside news management and censorship.
Nevertheless, Hegseth’s Pentagon has spent much of this year working to dismantle that protection. It scrubbed the policy guaranteeing “a free flow of news and information” without management or censorship, and accused the paper of publishing “woke distractions” and “repurposed DC gossip columns.”
"We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on social media earlier this year. “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.”
In a letter published Friday on the Stars and Stripes website, the active-duty Navy Capt. Bill Urban, who previously served in public affairs roles and was appointed "military deputy to the publisher" earlier this month, pledged to maintain the paper's high standards.
"I understand that I am now part of a team, committed to editorially independent journalism that best serves our most important customer, which is our service members, their families, and our greater military community," he wrote.
But how can editorial independence survive when the people who exercise it are punished for doing so? Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen are demanding answers from Hegseth, giving him an August 28 deadline to explain the recent shakeup and Urban’s role. The firings have also set off alarm bells for press freedom advocates, who slammed the move as an act designed to muzzle a free press.
"Stars and Stripes exists to produce independent journalism. When their team expressed concern over government censorship, the Pentagon went to war ... with the truth," the Freedom of the Press Foundation said in a statement.
National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. also denounced the firings as "brazen" and "disturbing" and called for the decision to be immediately reversed.
"In firing the editor of Stars and Stripes, Pentagon leadership is making clear their view that the newsroom should exist not as an independent outlet whose reporting serves to benefit U.S. troops, but as a mouthpiece to parrot Pentagon talking points," he said. "Our service members deserve news and information they can trust, not narratives that are shaped solely by their own employer. Our military—and the public—deserve better.”
