Fired Stars and Stripes Reporter Defends Editorial Independence Amid Pentagon Tensions

The Pentagon fired three people last Friday. Lara Korte was one of them. She worked as a reporter for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has served service members and their families for decades. The official reason: insubordination. The actual reason, according to Korte and her editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, was that they had spoken to CBS News about the newspaper's editorial independence—and someone in the Pentagon did not like that.

Korte sat down with CBS News on Monday, days after her dismissal, to explain what happened. She had given an interview to the network in July about her work covering the Middle East. In that piece, she made a simple claim: she worked for Stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. She was there to cover the military community. Her editor-in-chief, Erik Slavin, had been asked about red lines—things he would never do. His answer was direct: he would not run a story the Pentagon wrote and handed to him instead of publishing accurate reporting. That, he said, would be a red line.

When the Pentagon moved to terminate Korte, Slavin, and Publisher Max Lederer on Friday, it cited insubordination. But Korte said Monday that she had followed protocol. She had told her superiors about the CBS News interview. She had spoken to other news organizations before. "It's not unusual for us to speak to other outlets," she said. "This is something that's normal and my editors were aware that I was doing it." She had not been pressured to kill a story or publish something she did not believe in. "As far as I understood, our policy of editorial independence was standing very strong," she said.

The tension points to something larger. Stars and Stripes operates on roughly $29 million a year, and about half of that comes from taxpayers. It reaches an average of hundreds of thousands of people each day—service members stationed overseas, families in remote locations where internet access is unreliable or nonexistent. For decades, the newspaper has prided itself on independence from Pentagon control. But that independence, Korte suggested, has to mean something in practice, not just in words. "I've certainly been bolstered to see comments from the Stripes' leadership and from the Pentagon that the Stripes is editorially independent," she said. "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."

The Pentagon's official position, delivered by spokesperson Sean Parnell, frames the firings differently. The department is moving to modernize Stars and Stripes, he said, and to "refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members." Korte pushed back on that framing. Recent memos, she said, indicated the Pentagon wanted to stop Stars and Stripes from syndicating articles from the Associated Press and the Washington Post. Those articles, she argued, were valuable to readers who had no other way to stay informed. "We have readers who are out in austere locations, they can't access websites, they can't access the internet, and so keeping them informed about what's really going on in the world, even when it's not necessarily something we're directly writing, is also really important," she said.

What happens next remains unclear. The firings have raised a question that will likely echo through the coming weeks: whether a taxpayer-funded military newspaper can maintain genuine editorial independence when the institution that funds it disagrees with what it publishes. Korte's dismissal suggests the Pentagon believes it can set the terms. Her defense suggests the newspaper's staff believes otherwise. The answer will come not in statements about independence, but in what Stars and Stripes actually publishes—and what it does not.