As many service members and veterans likely know, Stars and Stripes is a military newspaper with a generations-old pedigree, and has long described itself as the “U.S. military’s independent news source.”
The word “independent” is key. Stars and Stripes covers the military, but it has long enjoyed the same kind of editorial freedom that civilian newspapers have, even if that means publishing reports the Pentagon doesn’t always like.
It was against this backdrop that Donald Trump’s Defense Department decided it was time to change the nature of Stars and Stripes’ work. The New York Times reported:
The Pentagon on Thursday said it planned to commandeer Stars and Stripes, a government-funded newspaper that covers the military, and align it with official department messaging.
‘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,’ Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, wrote in a post on X.
The decision to effectively seize control over Stars and Stripes came roughly a month after the Pentagon held its first briefing with a group of conservative “correspondents” who agreed to cover the DOD in ways the administration approved of.
One day after the Pentagon commandeered Stars and Stripes, the public learned that CBS News had aired an unedited version of anchor Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Donald Trump following a demand from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who reportedly had threatened to sue the network if it failed to comply.
One day after that, the president said he intended to issue an executive directive that would order television networks not to air other college football games at the same time as the annual Army-Navy football game. In isolation, all of these stories are important, but taken together, a picture emerges of an administration that doesn’t just want to criticize parts of the media, it also wants to control parts of the media — even if that means trying to exceed legal limits. Asked about Trump’s plan for an executive order on networks and college football games, for example, Jeffrey Cole, the director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Center for the Digital Future, told The Washington Post: “With a stroke of a pen, the President will assert a power that any television programmer in history would have killed for. While the goal may be commendable (at least for Army-Navy), and the President has as much right to persuade or coerce as any fan, he has no legal power of enforcement.” Of course, if Trump were concerned about legal limits, much of his agenda would quickly evaporate, so it’s likely he’ll issue the directive anyway.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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