Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

In March, Rebecca Holland, an Italy-based reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, reported that an army mentorship group for female paratroopers at a base in Vicenza, Italy, had opened to male participation, in order to comply with new Trump administration restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Soon after the story was published, Holland received a call from a public affairs officer, reprimanding her. “She tried to say that I couldn’t come on the base, and I needed her permission to come onto the base in the future, which is definitely not true,” Holland said.

Stars and Stripes is a newspaper for the military community, which has been continually published since World War II. It is partly funded by the Pentagon, and its employees are technically employees of the Department of Defense, but its editorial independence, which is mandated by Congress, has long been held sacrosanct. “It is the embodiment of the First Amendment,” said Kathy Kiely, chair in free press studies at the University of Missouri. “It’s published by the Pentagon, and yet it’s free to criticize the Pentagon.” But the exchange with the public affairs officer, just a couple of months into the Trump administration, suggested to Holland and others at the paper that perhaps this dynamic was changing. Holland, who left the paper in June for a reporting job at another outlet, said that at the beginning of the year, she sat through team meetings where her takeaway was that staff should not make too much trouble with the administration. “We had a lot of meetings about, like, we basically just don’t want to draw attention to Stars and Stripes,” Holland said.

In many ways, Stars and Stripes has been one of the lucky ones. During the first Trump administration the paper seemed to be on the verge of losing its funding—a threat the White House has since followed through on with the nation’s public broadcasters. After an outcry from a bipartisan group of lawmakers and veterans, Trump announced that he would spare the publication. “It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!” he said, in a 2020 social media post. The outlet was also protected earlier this year when several major outlets were removed from their dedicated office space at the Pentagon.

“I see what’s going on with other journalism organizations,” said Jacqueline Smith, the paper’s ombudsman. “I’d be naive to not be concerned.” Smith is among several staffers who point to a growing challenge of getting information from military public affairs officers, or PAOs. In a March email to editorial staff, obtained by CJR, Erik Slavin, Stars and Stripes’ Europe and Mideast bureau chief, acknowledged that interactions with PAOs had become more complicated. “I’m seeing concerning behavior among some commands/PAOs in various theaters, which I believe stem from fear of the appearance of stepping out of line with the changes in Washington,” Slavin wrote. He also emphasized the importance of maintaining journalistic rigor: “The bigger part of our job is to report what is newsworthy and uphold the principle of first amendment access to service members and the military community. We will scrupulously maintain balance and avoid the implication of bias to the maximum extent possible,” he wrote. 

In an email to CJR, Slavin said he sent the memo after a new public affairs officer told a Stars and Stripes reporter she wasn’t allowed to talk to the paper. He added that he resolved that matter after speaking with the PAO’s superior, who said the junior officer spoke in error. “In any new administration, there are changes in government,” Slavin said. “That does not change our mission to be as balanced, unbiased, and objective as humanly possible for the benefit of the military community we serve. We have reinforced our standards of newsgathering. But they haven’t changed.” Longtime publisher Max Lederer told CJR that “there is always an ebb and flow” when it comes to interacting with public affairs officers, but denied that it had gotten harder, or that the paper was adjusting its coverage to avoid drawing negative attention from the administration. “There’s always that possibility” that the paper could be turned into a military mouthpiece, Lederer said—but his main worry these days is that it would simply be defunded for budgetary reasons.

Smith tries to take comfort in the idea that the administration has learned its lesson from the backlash during the first term. “I don’t feel like there’s any particular protection that Stripes has right now,” she said, “other than let’s hope that, from the first time, when you saw the great support that came out to continue the Stripes, that they wouldn’t want to go through all that again.”

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.