CBS Sunday Morning aired the segment on July 5, 2026. The firings came seven weeks later. The paperwork said insubordination. The evidence was the interview.
I am not writing this piece as a press critic. I am not a journalism scholar. I am a Marine Corps veteran. I hold a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier. I teach, and I publish this Substack about how institutions fail the publics they owe.
I served in four countries and retired as a Master Sergeant. At every duty station, from Camp Pendleton to Yuma to Okinawa to Camp Fallujah to Camp Leatherneck, the paper we could always count on was Stars and Stripes.
That is where I stand. It is where I write from.
What is settled
On Friday, August 21, 2026, the Department of Defense issued separation notices to three people at the Stars and Stripes newspaper. Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief. Max D. Lederer Jr., publisher. Lara Korte, Middle East reporter.
The stated charge on Slavin's and Korte's paperwork was insubordination. Neither had refused an order. The "insubordination" was appearing on the CBS Sunday Morning segment "The Battle over Stars and Stripes," which aired on July 5, 2026.
On camera, Slavin said this: “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story, run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon. That would be a red line.”
Korte said this: “I’m working for Stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”
Neither called for anything. Neither refused anything. Both stated the standing law of their own paper and the standing policy of their own department. That was the fireable offense.
Lederer had already announced his September 30 retirement three days before the notice, in a Tuesday, August 18 letter to staff saying his understanding of the paper’s mission differed “in fundamental ways” from the current Pentagon. His firing on Friday closed a 15-year publishing tenure six weeks early.
Six days after the firings, on August 27, all three filed suit in federal court alleging First Amendment retaliation. A separate suit filed on June 3 by two outside editors, Suki Dardarian and Bill Church, was already pending against the Department, Secretary Pete Hegseth, Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell.
What else is settled
None of this began on August 21.
On January 15, 2026, the Department of Defense removed the operative language from the Code of Federal Regulations that had governed the paper since 1988. The removed language read: "there shall be a free flow of news and information to its readership without news management or censorship." The rescission was done without public notice, without a comment period, and without notifying Congress in advance. It is the subject of the June 3 lawsuit.
Later that month, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted that the paper would be "custom tailored to our warfighters" and would eliminate "woke distractions."
On March 9, 2026, the Department issued a memo imposing new content restrictions. Most Associated Press, Reuters, and Washington Post wire content was banned. Comic strips were banned. Filing Freedom of Information Act requests in an official capacity was banned. Content was required to be “consistent with good order and discipline.” The ombudsman, a position created by Congress in the 1991 National Defense Authorization Act specifically to protect editorial independence, was required to route information through the Department before reporting to Congress.
On April 8, 2026, ombudsman Jacqueline Smith was fired. Her April column had criticized the March restrictions.
On April 15, 2026, Representative Jamie Raskin and 38 House colleagues sent Secretary Hegseth a letter demanding documentation of every article altered or suppressed, compliance with court rulings on Pentagon press access, and the March 9 memo itself. The letter said: “A free and independent press is indispensable to the functioning of our democracy. The First Amendment does not stop at the doors of the Pentagon.”
On June 2, the Pentagon closed the Correspondents’ Corridor that had housed press access for decades. On June 3, the Dardarian and Church suit was filed. On July 5, CBS Sunday Morning aired the segment. On August 18, Lederer announced retirement. On August 21, the three were fired. On August 27, the three fired sued.
The eight months between the January rescission and the August firings ran on a single mechanism. The Department rewrote the standing rule in silence and then punished the staff who kept referring to the old one.
What Mauldin knew
Bill Mauldin was 22 years old when Stars and Stripes ran his first Willie and Joe cartoon in Sicily in 1943. He was a sergeant. He drew two enlisted infantrymen, unshaven, dirt-caked, resentful of officers, exhausted by the war their generals were running from behind. Willie and Joe were on the paper’s back page most days for the rest of the war. They won Mauldin a Pulitzer in 1945, when he was 23.
General George S. Patton did not like Willie and Joe. He said the cartoons were “scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline.” He said they made American soldiers “look like goddamn bums.” In one command he ordered his Third Army to seize copies of the paper carrying the strip. He summoned Mauldin to his headquarters in Luxembourg to shut the strip down in person.
That confrontation, in March 1945, is one of the load-bearing moments in the history of American military journalism. Mauldin stood in Patton’s office while a four-star general, the man who had commanded the invasion of Sicily and the drive across France, told a 23-year-old sergeant to stop drawing the cartoon that soldiers turned to first when the paper arrived.
Mauldin did not stop.
He did not stop because General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded Patton, had already issued the order that made the meeting unwinnable for the general. Eisenhower had directed that officers were prohibited from interfering with Mauldin’s cartoons or with other controversial materials in the army newspaper. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe had drawn the line where Marshall had drawn it three years earlier. The paper is the paper, the brass is the brass, and the two do not cross the wire.
“Mauldin draws what Mauldin wants,” Eisenhower said.
That is the whole doctrine. Six words.
Mauldin’s own account of why the cartoons mattered came back always to the reader. The enlisted man in a foxhole in Belgium, opening the paper by candlelight, needed to see something on the page that reflected what he was actually looking at, rather than what his division commander wanted him to be looking at. If the paper stopped showing him that, the paper stopped being his.
He put it more plainly elsewhere. “I’m against oppression, by whomever. If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it. If it’s big, hit it. You can’t go far wrong.”
That is a doctrine of press independence written in the register of a sergeant who has read too many operational orders. It is what a soldier’s paper is for.
The check that used to be there
Prior administrations have tried to control the paper’s content. Every attempt was reversed by someone higher in the chain than the person doing the reaching. This time the higher-in-the-chain is doing the reaching.
In 1918, the paper’s own founding officer, Capt. Guy T. Viskniskki, pulled stories he judged bad for morale. That fight is why Pershing’s “free thought and free expression of a free people” line got written into the charter. The Patton and Mauldin confrontation in 1945 is the second episode, and it went the way it did because Eisenhower had already ruled. In 1968, a soldier’s letter about morale problems and suicides at a California anti-missile base ran on the front page over his commanding officer’s objection. In 1970, a Stars and Stripes reporter named Bob Hodierne wrote that daily calls from officers complaining about coverage were so routine that the Saigon bureau chief got worried when a day passed without one.
By the late 1980s, the pattern of officer interference was frequent enough that Congress opened a formal investigation. The 1988 regulation, the one the current Department rescinded on January 15, 2026, came out of that investigation. Its “free flow of news and information to its readership without news management or censorship” language was Congress writing the standing rule down where it could be read. When interference continued anyway, Congress went further. The 1991 National Defense Authorization Act created the ombudsman position in law and required the ombudsman to report to Congress rather than to the Department. That is the position Secretary Hegseth eliminated on April 8, 2026.
At Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily in the late 1990s, a Navy captain ordered an enlisted Stars and Stripes reporter to appear in uniform after a story upset him. The Pentagon’s London office overruled the captain the moment they learned of the DoD directive. He backed off.
In February 2020, the first Trump Pentagon proposed eliminating the roughly $15 million in annual federal support that carried about half the paper’s budget. Deputy Under Secretary Elaine McCusker said the paper was “probably not the best way that we communicate any longer.” In September, Defense Secretary Mark Esper issued a shutdown order: dissolution by September 15, publication ended September 30. Senators Dianne Feinstein, Tammy Duckworth, and Susan Collins led a bipartisan opposition push. On September 4, 2020, President Trump reversed the decision publicly. The shutdown was rescinded on September 30. The paper survived.
The record is consistent. Patton was overruled by Eisenhower. The Sigonella captain was overruled by the Pentagon’s own directive-compliance office. Officer interference through the 1980s was overruled by Congress writing the regulation. Continued interference after 1988 was overruled by Congress writing the ombudsman into law. The 2020 defunding attempt was overruled by the President himself, under bipartisan Senate pressure. Every attempt in the paper’s modern history to control it was reversed by someone higher in the chain than the person doing the reaching.
There is no one higher in the chain in 2026.
The interference is coming from the Secretary of Defense. The White House is aligned. No bipartisan Senate coalition on the scale of the 2020 opposition has formed. The President who personally reversed the Esper defunding order in September 2020 is the President whose Secretary is running the current version. Two federal lawsuits and statements from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression are the outside check. Congressional Democrats and one 39-member House letter are the inside check. That is not the architecture that reversed every prior attempt.
The doctrine “Mauldin draws what Mauldin wants” worked because Eisenhower was standing behind it. The doctrine survives its own text only when someone is willing to enforce it.
What Mauldin makes visible
Mauldin, Marshall, and Eisenhower agreed on something the current Pentagon has decided to un-agree with.
They agreed the paper existed for the reader in the foxhole, not for the commander at the podium. They agreed the commander did not get to control the paper even when the cartoons made him look bad. They agreed that “military discipline,” Patton’s specific phrase, was not the criterion by which the paper’s content would be judged, because the moment it was, the paper stopped being a paper.
The March 9, 2026 memo uses the phrase “good order and discipline” to describe the criterion by which the paper’s content will now be judged.
That is Patton’s language, restored to operative force 81 years after Eisenhower ruled it out of bounds. The Department did not litigate the standing rule. It rewrote it. The regulation that codified Eisenhower’s line came out of the Code of Federal Regulations on January 15. Patton’s line came back in on March 9. The staff who kept quoting Eisenhower were fired in August.
Slavin’s “red line” on CBS was the Eisenhower line. Korte’s statement that she works for the paper and not for the Pentagon was the Eisenhower line. Lederer’s letter saying his understanding of the paper’s mission differed “in fundamental ways” from the current Pentagon was the Eisenhower line. Three people were fired for maintaining a doctrine four-star generals ran on for 84 years.
The line is gone because it was inconvenient. Nobody found it wrong.
What the Department owed
The Department did not have to make this up as it went.
The standing rule was published. Pershing, 1918: the paper “shall represent the free thought and free expression of a free people.” Marshall, 1942: “No official control was ever exercised.” Eisenhower’s order to Patton, March 1945: officers are prohibited from interfering. The federal regulation, standing until January 15, 2026: “a free flow of news and information to its readership without news management or censorship.” The National Defense Authorization Act of 1991: creates the ombudsman position specifically to protect editorial independence, reporting to Congress.
Five citations. Three generals, one regulation, one statute. Each was operative on the day I raised my right hand at Kansas City in 1993.
Every one of them has been removed, defied, or contradicted since January.
The March 9 memo is the shape of the contradiction. The April 8 ombudsman firing is the shape of the defiance. The January 15 CFR rescission is the shape of the removal. The August 21 firings are the shape of what happens to staff who kept referring to what was operative when they were hired.
The Department is exercising authority the standing rule specifically denied it. The rule was written to prevent exactly this.
What the fired staff said after
Slavin, on his firing: “I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies.” On the CBS statement that got him fired: “a hypothetical response, in my personal opinion, as to what would be my red line.” On what accountability to readers looks like: “They hold us accountable every day. If we get something that doesn’t correspond with their lived experience, they call us out on it real fast.” On the paper’s future: “I certainly hope Stars and Stripes can remain independent in some way. I haven’t given up on that, but time will tell, and I think there needs to be a reckoning.”
Korte, on X the day of the firing: “I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker. These firings are a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.” On editorial independence in the days after: “Obviously that’s something that has to be instituted in practice, and I think that’s something we’re going to get an answer on in the coming weeks and months.”
Korte also flagged, in an NPR interview, that the March 9 memo directs the paper to stop syndicating Associated Press and Washington Post articles that serve service members in what she called “austere locations” without reliable internet access. Marines at sea. Soldiers on remote forward operating bases. Sailors on 250-day deployments like the USS Abraham Lincoln, which the paper had covered. Those readers were the ones the wire ban ate first.
Lederer, from his August 18 retirement letter: his understanding of the paper’s value and mission differed “in fundamental ways” from the current Department.
These are the words that put the paperwork in motion. Read them again, slowly. There is no call for insurrection in them. There is no attack on any commander. There is a statement, in plain English, of the standing rule of an American newspaper published continuously since the Civil War.
What I am not saying
I am not saying Slavin, Korte, or Lederer were correct in every editorial call they made. I do not have the receipts to say that, and it is not what this piece is about.
I am not saying Stars and Stripes was a perfect paper. It was not. It made the mistakes newspapers make. I read some of them while stationed in Okinawa.
I am not saying the Pentagon has no legitimate operational security concerns. It does. The standing rule was never about publishing troop movements or classified sources. It was about who owns what the paper says.
I am not saying Pete Hegseth is uniquely bad. That framing lets his successors off the hook. Every action documented in this piece is an exercise of authority that was never supposed to be exercised over this paper by anyone. The person in the seat matters less than the seat’s new interpretation of what it is entitled to do.
I am not saying the paper is finished. Slavin himself said he had not given up on it. Two lawsuits are pending. Congress has moved. History is longer than any single administration.
I am saying what comes next.
What I am saying
I am saying the paper you and I are reading is not the paper you can read now.
I am saying the rule that made it that paper was rewritten in silence by memo, and the people who kept referring to the old rule were fired for it. “Good order and discipline” has returned to the paper’s charter as the standard by which its content will be judged. That is Patton’s language, restored to operative force 81 years after Eisenhower ruled it out of bounds.
The mechanism the current Department is running is not new to any of us who have served in institutions that write down the rule and then rewrite it when the rule becomes inconvenient. It is the standard failure. It has a shape. It has stages. You can name them.
Stage one: rewrite the operative language in silence. January 15.
Stage two: replace it with the language of the officer who tried to run the rule out of bounds the first time. March 9.
Stage three: fire the staff who keep quoting the old language. April 8. August 21.
Stage four: refuse to identify by name the officer who signed the paperwork. The Department has not named the March 9 signer. The Department has not named the person who ordered the August 21 separations. Only Sean Parnell, on the record, speaks for the mechanism.
The reason to name the stages is not so you can be angry at them. It is so you can watch for them in the institutions you have skin in. K-12 districts. Community colleges. City councils. Union locals. Congregations. Employers. Board meetings. The mechanism does not need the Pentagon to run. It needs a rulebook and a room full of people who stopped opening it.
I write publicly under my own name because I believe the record is worth keeping. Stars and Stripes was the paper that made that possible for people who could not keep the record themselves — because they were on a ship for 250 days, or in a village in Helmand, or on a runway repair detachment at Yuma Proving Ground with the sky and their radios and the standing paper on the day-room table. The paper was the read that told them the truth their own institution was trying to make it inconvenient for them to have.
That paper still exists. Its independence is now something that will have to be “instituted in practice,” as Korte put it, rather than referred to as operative.
The three people who tried to institute it in practice were fired for saying so.
Read the record. Read the ballot the way you would read the record. Every race, every proposition. Vote. vote411.org
Author’s note. This one was harder to write than I expected. I never met Erik Slavin or Lara Korte or Max Lederer. I read the paper they were fired for defending on paper at every post I ever held. That is a small fact. It sits behind every sentence in this piece.
You refuse to know. The record remembers. I refuse to forget.
— JWW
This piece was written with AI assistance under the disclosure framework at what-time-binds.com. The analytical frame, the sources, and every position taken are mine. Every primary quote in this piece was verified against the original CBS Sunday Morning segment, the CBS post-firing interviews, the NPR and PBS coverage, the Democracy Forward complaint, and the Department’s own published directives before publication.