Three former Stars and Stripes journalists sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and agency spokesperson Sean Parnell on Thursday, claiming the Trump administration pursued “extraordinary censorship efforts” against the news outlet and illegally fired them.
The Pentagon fired three journalists — Publisher Max Lederer, Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte — on Aug. 21 for insubordination. The purge violated their First Amendment rights, the lawsuit alleges.
Korte wrote in a Thursday post on X that “everyone deserves the right to a free and independent press, especially our service members.”
“This lawsuit is about safeguarding the mission of Stars and Stripes journalists so they can continue to do their jobs without fear or retaliation,” she said.
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The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Slavin and Korte said their firing for insubordination was related to interviews they gave during a CBS News segment that aired last month, in which they defended the independence of the partially federally funded paper.
“According to the notice, I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a personal red line,” Slavin said in a statement to NOTUS last week. “The Pentagon’s public affairs office has charged me with insubordination. I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies.”
Over a month after the CBS interviews, Stars and Stripes published a story detailing mental health problems, food and water shortages and other poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln. More than five weeks after the story ran, Pentagon officials ordered Lederer to present separation notices to Slavin and Korte, the lawsuit says.
Lederer did not deliver the notices, instead announcing his plans to retire next month over “fundamental” differences with the department after serving as the paper’s publisher for 19 years. The Pentagon fired him before he could retire.
Last April, the Pentagon also fired Jacqueline Smith, the publication’s ombudsman who focused on maintaining the paper’s editorial independence.
The newspaper’s mission had been called into question in January when Parnell called the publication “woke” and said it would return to its original goal of reporting for military members.
“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,” Parnell said on X. “Stars & Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters. It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”
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