It is why an active-duty public-affairs officer belongs in senior management of a newspaper whose job includes scrutinizing military public affairs.⁸
The final Pentagon directive issued Friday is actually more careful than some of the earlier proposals. It says Stars and Stripes may publish critical analysis and reporting that disagrees with Pentagon policy, and it narrows the earlier, dangerously vague language about “good order and discipline.” On paper, quite a lot of independence remains.⁹
Then you read the organization chart.
Pentagon public-affairs leadership has substantial authority over the people running the organization. The publisher remains inside the Pentagon hierarchy. The ombudsman’s communications with Congress travel through Pentagon channels. The newspaper generally may not purchase commercial news stories, syndicated columns and other outside material without approval, and its reporters face unusual limits on filing Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the newspaper.⁹
Each provision can undoubtedly be defended separately. Bureaucracies are very good at defending provisions separately. Together they create a newspaper whose senior personnel, outside content, investigative tools and institutional oversight are increasingly controlled by the institution the newspaper is supposed to cover.
The Pentagon’s defense deserves to be taken seriously. Nobody has produced an order from Trump, Pete Hegseth or anyone else saying, “Do not publish this story.” The Pentagon’s policy explicitly promises editorial independence. Stars and Stripes continues to publish journalism that makes military leadership uncomfortable. Federal employees also have personnel obligations that reporters working for The New York Times or The Boston Globe do not have.
All true. But this is where the Stars and Stripes story becomes more interesting than Stars and Stripes.
It is part of a broader pattern in the Trump administration’s dealings with troublesome journalism: where government already possesses leverage over the job, the license or the money, overt censorship may be unnecessary.
Consider Voice of America. VOA was created during World War II to broadcast reliable American news to people living under governments that specialized in propaganda. In March 2025, Trump ordered its parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, reduced to the minimum operation required by law. Employees were put on administrative leave, programming was severely disrupted and massive staff reductions followed. The administration said it was eliminating a bloated and politically biased bureaucracy; employees and press-freedom advocates challenged the actions in court.¹⁰
There was no need for somebody at the White House to sit beside a VOA editor crossing out troublesome sentences. If most of the people who might write the sentences are no longer working, the editing problem largely takes care of itself.
ABC offers a different version of the problem. Disney and ABC are suing the Federal Communications Commission after the agency ordered eight ABC-owned television stations into unusually early license-renewal proceedings. ABC alleges that the government is using its regulatory powers to retaliate for programming the administration dislikes; the FCC says it is pursuing legitimate regulatory concerns. The dispute remains unresolved.¹¹
The allegation has not been proved, but the mechanism is worth noticing. A broadcaster does not have to receive a memo saying “change this program” to understand that the government controls something it cannot legally operate without.
With NPR and PBS, the administration went after federal money. Trump ordered federal support cut off, describing the networks as biased, while the broadcasters challenged the action as retaliation for protected journalism. Subsequent congressional action complicated the funding fight, but once again the lever was not an editor’s blue pencil. It was the government’s control over something the news organization needed.¹²
At Voice of America, the government controls the jobs. At ABC, it controls the licenses. With NPR and PBS, it went after the money. At Stars and Stripes, it controls the organization chart.
These are different institutions, different laws and different disputes, and allegations of retaliation in some of them remain exactly that—allegations. But the method is recognizably similar.