An Army sergeant with the 153rd Military Police Company reads an edition of Stars and Stripes while in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Oct. 18, 2007. (Brendan Mackie/U.S. Army)
The Pentagon suggested Thursday it would take over editorial content decision-making for Stars and Stripes in a statement from the Defense Department’s top spokesman.
“The Department of War is returning Stars & Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters. We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top public affairs official and a close adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote in a statement posted to X. “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.”
The statement appears to challenge the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes, which while a part of the Pentagon’s Defense Media Activity has long retained independence from editorial oversight from the Pentagon under a congressional mandate that it be governed by First Amendment principles.
Parnell wrote Thursday that the military newspaper would “be custom tailored to our warfighter” with a focus on “warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY.”
He said Stars and Stripes would no longer post “repurposed DC gossip columns” or “Associated Press reprints.”
Hegseth reposted Parnell’s statement.
Spokespersons for Hegseth’s office declined to provide additional comment or detail about the statement Thursday morning.
Stars and Stripes first appeared during the Civil War, and it has been continuously published since World War II. It produces daily newspapers for U.S. military troops across the world and a website, stripes.com, which is updated with news 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Stars and Stripes reporter Matthew Adams contributed to this report.
This report will be updated.