One of the central aspects of a democratic society is a nonpartisan military. Even more remarkable is our ability to maintain, within that military, an independent non-partisan media institution, the longstanding military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Naturally, the Trump administration is chipping away at that achievement.
The Hill reports:
The Pentagon recently ousted the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes’s ombudsman, the person meant to monitor the outlet’s editorial independence and report concerns to Congress.
“Apparently the Pentagon also doesn’t want you to hear from me anymore about threats to the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They fired me,” Jacqueline Smith, wrote Thursday in an op-ed published in the newspaper. …
The ombudsman role for the publication, which Smith took on in December 2023, is meant to serve as a watchdog monitoring the paper’s independence. Congress created the position in 1991 after military personnel in the late 1980s attempted on multiple occasions to suppress unfavorable news of the Iran-Contra affair and other issues, she wrote, adding that the ombudsman must report to lawmakers at least once a year.
“As required, I have told the House and Senate Armed Services committees in recent months of my great and growing concern about attempted control of the newspaper by the Pentagon,” Smith wrote. …
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on Jan. 15 announced the department would modernize the paper’s operations, “refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon [sic] morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.” …
The changes at Stars and Stripes are part of a series of actions meant to restrict Pentagon reporters under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has sought to bar certain journalists from the building and set limits on how they seek out information from government sources.
This is part of the Trump administration’s larger quest to consolidate power by suppressing the reporting of any facts or opinions that contradict their preferred narratives, starving the public of the information they need to make informed decisions.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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