It was reported Friday, initially in a USA Today op-ed, that the Pentagon was calling for the all but immediate shutdown of the century-and-a-half-old military newspaper Stars and Stripes, going so far as to call on the publication in a recent memo to map out a plan “for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide.”
“The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be September 30, 2020,” wrote Army Col. Paul Haverstick Jr., director of defense media activity at Fort Meade, Md., whose signature is on the Pentagon memo.
The op-ed was published just hours after a firestorm erupted with the publication of an Atlantic story by Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, depicting the president questioning why a smart person would serve in the military and disparaging American war dead as suckers and losers and a few days after a Military Times poll showed President Donald Trump losing support among active-duty military.
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A 2013 issue of the print edition of Stars and Stripes seen at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey.
U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Eric Summers Jr.
Stars and Stripes, which would have marked its 159th anniversary in early November, recently reported that a bipartisan group of more than a dozen U.S. senators had appealed to Defense Secretary Mike Esper to continue funding the publication.
The House, according to the USA Today opinion piece, penned by University of Missouri free-press scholar Kathy Kiely, specifically sought to reverse the zeroing out in Trump’s proposed fiscal 2021 budget of the newspaper’s $15.5 million annual subsidy.
That sum, Kiely wrote in an echo of the senators’ letter, is negligible against the backdrop of the Defense Department’s overall budget of some $700 billion but is enormously impactful for the paper’s 1.3 million readers and “would eliminate a symbol of the U.S. commitment to press freedom.”
A sampling of reaction on social media to the report that Stars and Stripes would be, in fact, be shut down:
From the archives (February 2020):Military newspaper Stars and Stripes set to lose half its funding as Pentagon shifts budget priorities
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