Stars and Stripes Keeps Its Head Down

In March, Rebecca Holland, an Italy-based reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, reported that an army mentorship group for female paratroopers at a base in Vicenza, Italy, had opened to male participation, in order to comply with new Trump administration restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Soon after the story was published, Holland received a call from a public affairs officer, reprimanding her. “She tried to say that I couldn’t come on the base, and I needed her permission to come onto the base in the future, which is definitely not true,” Holland said.

Stars and Stripes is a newspaper for the military community, which has been continually published since World War II. It is partly funded by the Pentagon, and its employees are technically employees of the Department of Defense, but its editorial independence, which is mandated by Congress, has long been held sacrosanct. “It is the embodiment of the First Amendment,” said Kathy Kiely, chair in free press studies at the University of Missouri. “It’s published by the Pentagon, and yet it’s free to criticize the Pentagon.” But the exchange with the public affairs officer, just a couple of months into the Trump administration, suggested to Holland and others at the paper that perhaps this dynamic was changing. Holland, who left the paper in June for a reporting job at another outlet, said that at the beginning of the year, she sat through team meetings where her takeaway was that staff should not make too much trouble with the administration. “We had a lot of meetings about, like, we basically just don’t want to draw attention to Stars and Stripes,” Holland said.