Stars and Stripes remains on duty and in service to the military community

Erik Slavin is the Stars and Stripes’ editor-in-chief. (Photo courtesy of Stars and Stripes)

Independence is fundamental to our credibility, to our purpose, to our mission, and it has been for many decades. It was Dwight Eisenhower who laid that down and said, this is the soldier’s paper, don’t interfere.”

Erik Slavin

As the United States turns 250, the word “independence” does a lot of heavy lifting. It was 250 years ago this July — on what we now refer to as Independence Day — that the country’s forefathers threw down the gauntlet in the form of pen and parchment. 

After the Declaration came the Constitution and its promise for free press and speech. The Stars and Stripes newspaper was born during the Civil War and has claimed independence while covering every war since then. It is a publication unlike any other in the country.

Stars and Stripes is a mission-driven news organization serving U.S. service members, especially overseas, and their families. It employs mostly civilian, professional journalists (with some military contributors) across bureaus in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia — producing daily news, enterprise reporting, regionally focused community news and special publications. Operations combine print, digital, social and short-form video, reaching about 1.4 million people across platforms. 

Funding is mixed and includes partial Pentagon support (as much as 40% of its annual budget) alongside advertising, subscriptions and special publications. Logistics require strict deadlines, complex distribution to remote bases, and rigorous safety/risk assessments for conflict reporting.

The job of running Stripes has responsibilities and pressures unique among the news publishing industry. Many of its reporters cover news in locations “within rockets’ red glare.” A tremendous amount of care is needed to ensure that journalists cover issues correctly — and safely.

“You do a risk assessment. That’s the first thing you do when you’re sending somebody into a conflict zone, and then you continue those risk assessments when they are there,” said Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin.

“We had a reporter in her apartment in Bahrain. … It was unusual in the sense that typically we send somebody to a combat zone and set them up, and we have a fixer and we have any number of security provisions, but this time the war came to their living room, literally,” Slavin said. “She could see it right from her windows. … And we waited for a moment where she was able to get video from the top of a nearby hotel, and she could see a plume coming up over the Navy base, and that video received somewhere between 1.5 million, 2 million views. So, we talked that over with her while she was there. What are you seeing? What are you doing? How far away is the fire, and what’s your plan if it comes closer? That’s just an example of what we’ve been doing for decades — many, many decades.

“We had an apartment in Kabul, [Afghanistan] during the war, not on base, but downtown, so we could more easily get around, and everything we did there started with, ‘OK, who are you going to be with? What are you going to be wearing? What are you going to look like? What car are you going to be driving in? Who else is going to be there?’ All the different factors you have to consider in getting the story and keeping your people safe,” said Slavin.

“The support goes on afterward, also, because we recognize that people are going to see things that are traumatic, and we want to encourage them to talk about that. And if they need help, we find that help, as well,” the editor-in-chief explained.

The publication has been in the spotlight lately as pressure from the Pentagon has placed limits on what they can now publish. For example, the Pentagon prohibited the use of commercially available syndicated materials or cartoons, and it limited the use of wire services. The publication’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith — a position created by federal law — was fired. She contends she was fired because she’d been critical of the Pentagon’s editorial overreach. In response, a lawsuit was filed by plaintiffs Suki Dardarian and Bill Church, news executives who serve as civilian members of the Stars and Stripes advisory board. The plaintiffs are represented by Democracy Forward. Stars and Stripes is not itself a party to the lawsuit.

Stars and Stripes’ mission statement precisely states that it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command.”

All this puts Slavin in an unenviable position. He must continue to operate a news operation for military members, while independently covering a war with Iran that is unpopular in the U.S., and navigating the Pentagon’s new restrictions as a legal battle plays out — metaphorical land mines everywhere.

Slavin is measured with his words.

“Independence is fundamental to our credibility, to our purpose, to our mission, and it has been for many decades. It was Dwight Eisenhower who laid that down and said, this is the soldier’s paper, don’t interfere,” he said. “He was very clear about that. And so that’s how we operate, and we’re doing that now with some new guidance. There are still some open questions about how to implement that guidance and how it affects what we are able to provide. … At the same time, we have to go back to what our priority is, and that’s continuing to provide independent, fair, balanced, accurate news.”

Stars and Stripes recently produced important investigative journalism.

One project showed that military personnel were wrongly recorded in an FBI database as having convictions, when they may have only been interviewed but never charged with any wrongdoing. The inputs affected many veterans’ job prospects. Another investigation exposed that U.S. military members and civilian contractors were being wrongfully double‑taxed in Germany, with some facing six-figure losses.

Stars and Stripes is not a publication that blindly parrots Pentagon talking points. Its history shows that.

Laura Dumey is the executive director of the Stars and Stripes Museum. (Photo credit: Bob Miller)

In Bloomfield, Missouri, a small team of workers and volunteers operates the Stars and Stripes Museum. The museum has more than 10,000 square feet of multimedia exhibits. It traces the history of the publication to Nov. 9, 1861, when 10 Union soldiers from Southern Illinois took control of the Bloomfield Herald and printed the first edition.

Displays show coverage of wars, beginning with the first copy of the paper. Many photographs are on display, showing the conditions of war, including a vignette on Phil Stern, who broke into combat photography and went on to become a celebrity photographer in Hollywood. There is also a memorial dedicated to the journalists who lost their lives covering combat.

Two displays feel particularly pertinent. One is the cartoon section, and the other is a placard explaining the position and role of the ombudsman.

An exhibit at the Stars and Stripes National Museum and Library in Bloomfield Missouri commemorates journalist Steve Kroft’s U.S. Army service and reporting during the Vietnam War. (Photo credit: Bob Miller)

The cartoons varied in tone. Some struck a sarcastic tone about the weariness of the American soldier. “[During World War II,] General Patton tried to control the narrative. He tried to get Bill Mauldin’s cartoons taken out because he thought that they were sloven, and you know, didn’t reflect the army,” said the museum’s Executive Director Laura Dumey. “We need to keep that independence. We need to keep it apolitical. Stars and Stripes has been on the media-bias charts, in the middle all the time. It’s always been in the middle, up at the top, and that’s where it needs to stay. Look at the people that serve our military; they’re not just one party or another.”

As for the ombudsman, the museum exhibit explains that “Congress created the ombudsman post in the early 1990s to ensure that journalists operate with editorial independence and that Stars and Stripes readers receive a free flow of news and information without taint of censorship or propaganda.” The ombudsman’s job is, or was, to serve as a watchdog for the publication’s First Amendment rights.

When the Pentagon fired ombudsman Jacqueline Smith in April, Smith penned a final column that alleged she’d been fired for writing about the Pentagon’s directive to eliminate cartoons from the publication. She noted that the Pentagon rescinded the appeal process and did not allow for public comment, which is required by law — and that the Pentagon found a loophole to create an interim policy allowing them to fire her without appeal.

A solemn exhibit at the Stars and Stripes National Museum and Library pays tribute to Stars and Stripes journalists who died in service to their grateful nation and to the First Amendment. (Photo credit: Bob Miller)

The “Department of War,” as it’s been renamed under the Trump administration, declared: “We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century,” according to a post by chief spokesman Sean Parnell on X in January 2026. “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.”

According to reporting from PBS, the Pentagon said half of the outlet’s content would be generated by the Defense Department and that it would no longer publish material from The Associated Press nor Reuters. Max Lederer, Stripes publisher, told PBS in January that no one at the Pentagon had communicated with him prior.

Parnell said the recent lawsuit is “without merit,” and the Department expects to prevail.

Meanwhile, Stars and Stripes’ journalists continue to report and write; and a veritable army of people, civilians mostly, continue to deliver the print publication to bases all over the world.

“In the U.S., as you well know, there is a tendency to look at the media writ large negatively at times, and it’s really when bullets are flying around you, so to speak, that’s when I think you realize that there’s a real appreciation for what you do, particularly among the military members,” the editor-in-chief concluded.

Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.