Pentagon Restores Press Freedom by Removing the Press
The Pentagon restored full editorial independence to Stars and Stripes on Friday by dismissing the journalists most committed to exercising it. Editor in chief Erik Slavin, publisher Max Lederer and reporter Lara Korte received termination notices after publicly advancing the destabilizing idea that a military newspaper should report news without first asking military leadership which version of events would be most encouraging. Their departure protects the publication from becoming journalism, a mission-threatening condition in which reporters verify claims, identify failures and occasionally print sentences that have not been approved as inspirational.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s modernization program will relieve future editors of obsolete professional burdens including skepticism, context and noticing contradictions. Under the streamlined system, journalists will retain complete freedom to choose which Pentagon announcement to praise first, how many times to describe it as decisive and whether to place the secretary’s photograph above or beside the headline. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has called for moving the newspaper away from “woke distractions,” a broad category understood to include institutional accountability, inconvenient casualty figures and any paragraph that survives contact with an independent source. Officials said the restructuring would improve trust by ensuring readers are never confronted with information that conflicts with what they have already been instructed to believe.
President Donald Trump applauded the dismissals as a historic expansion of press liberty. “Nobody believes in a free press more than I do, and now this newspaper is incredibly free—free of editors, free of reporters and free of those very nasty facts,” Trump said. “People are saying it may be the freest newspaper ever published.” Pentagon officials emphasized that the changes do not constitute censorship, because censorship prevents journalists from publishing while the new policy merely prevents them from being journalists. Service members may therefore continue relying on Stars and Stripes as an independent source of whatever the Pentagon independently wants them to read. The First Amendment is safest when no one is permitted to use it.
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