The Pentagon announced on 15th January that it is transforming the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes into one that focuses on “reporting to our warfighters” and no longer includes the “woke distractions”.

This is the gist of a social media post by the spokesperson of the Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, and it lacks details and fails to refer to the history of the news outlet as being independent of the government and the military leadership. It is a day after The Washington Post announced that job seekers at Stars and Stripes were receiving questions asking what they would do to affirm the policies of President Donald Trump.

Stars and Stripes has its roots in the Civil War and has covered the news about the military in its paper or on the Internet since World War II, mostly to a readership predominantly of the service members abroad. The Pentagon contributes approximately half of its budget, and its employees are considered to be the employees of the Department of Defence.

The mission statement of the outlet is that it is editorially “free of interference by any outside its editorial chain-of-command and that the outlet is the only news organisation affiliated with the Defence Department” to be under the sway of the ideals of the First Amendment.

The independence in the 1990s was developed by Congress following the example of the military leadership taking part in the editorial decisions. In 2020, when Trump was in his first term in office, his Defence Secretary Mark Esper attempted to strip Stars and Stripes of government funding to effectively put the organisation out of business, but was vetoed by the president.

On X Thursday, Hegseth spokesman Sean Parnell announced, “ the Pentagon is reinstating the original purpose of Stars and Stripes to report on our warfighters.”  He claimed that the department is going to shift its content away from the woke distractions.

It will be a custom-tailored “Stars and Stripes to our warfighters, ” Parnell wrote. “It will specialise in war fighting, weaponry, fitness, lethality, survivability and EVERYTHING MILITARY. There would be no longer used DC gossip columns, and there would be no longer reprints by the Associated Press.”

He claimed that the department is dedicated to making sure that the legacy of the outlet is to report on news that is important to service members.

The publisher of Stars and Stripes, Max Lederer, did not respond at once to an invitation to comment. However, Jacqueline Smith, the ombudsman of the outlet, described the statement made by Parnell as a surprise. It covers issues that are of relevance to service members and their families, not weapons systems or war strategy, and she has not found anything woke about its reporting.

Smith said, “I believe that it is highly important that Stars and Stripes continues to be independent in its editorial role, and that is where its credibility lies.” Smith is a long-time newspaper editor in Connecticut who has been given a position that was established by Congress thirty years ago to make sure that independence is maintained, and that she works under the House Armed Services Committee.

It is the most recent action of the Trump administration to restrain journalists. The majority of the reporters in the legacy news houses have abandoned the Pentagon instead of accepting new conditions that have been set by Hegseth that will grant him excessive influence on what they write and what they report. The New York Times has gone to court in order to annul the rules.

Trump has also attempted to close down the government-funded news media in other countries abroad, such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, which air news about the world as an independent report.

This week, too, the administration raided the home of a Washington Post journalist as part of an inquiry into a contractor who allegedly stole government secrets, and this was seen by many journalists as some form of intimidation.

The Post said applicants to Stars and Stripes were being questioned on the way they would develop the executive orders and Trump policy priorities in the position. They were requested to name either one or two orders or initiatives that were important to them. That casts into doubt the suitability of a journalist being put to the test, which is, in effect, a loyalty test.

Smith added that the question on job applications was not the newspaper itself that was asking this, but the Office of Personnel Management of the government and that it was in line with what they were asking of job applicants for other government jobs.

But she said, “it was not what journalists should be asked to do. It is to the truth, not to the administration,” she added.