Pentagon fires the Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief and its Middle East reporter

What happened

Erik Slavin told The Associated Press that he was dismissed for insubordination after an interview he gave objecting to potential censorship by the U.S. military, and that he was being fired "for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line." Middle East reporter Lara Korte participated in the same interview and said on X that the Department of Defense was firing her for insubordination after she told a CBS reporter that she works for Stars and Stripes — "not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker." Slavin told the AP that his refusal to accept military censorship was cited in his termination notice as insubordination. A notice of separation also went to longtime publisher Max Lederer, who had announced earlier that week that he would retire at the end of September. The Pentagon partly funds the newspaper. The firings extend a documented sequence: in April the Pentagon fired the newspaper's ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, whose job had been to safeguard editorial independence, and Navy Captain William Urban was installed as military deputy to the publisher.

The Guardian, reporting the same day and citing CBS News, records that the termination notices cited insubordination and gave the recipients five days to appeal.

It places the dismissals days after the newspaper's reporting on crew conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which the Guardian says had caused concern among veteran and military health experts.

That reporting was published on 12 August, the same day as similar reporting in the Navy Times.

The Guardian reports that Pentagon officials had discussed firing Lederer ahead of the September retirement he had already announced.

Lederer, publisher for 19 years, wrote to staff that his understanding of the newspaper's value and mission differed in fundamental ways from the direction of Department of Defense leadership.

The Guardian puts a figure on the funding relationship the row describes as partial: the Pentagon provides about 65% of the newspaper's funding.

Why it matters

A newsroom the Department of Defense partly funds is one the department can staff. Removing its editor and one of its reporters after they publicly drew a line at censorship makes editorial independence a condition of continued employment rather than a settled expectation, and it does so at the level of the person who decides what the paper covers.