A dismissal, and the reason given for it
Erik Slavin had edited Stars and Stripes for 21 years when the Department of Defense dismissed him for insubordination. The paper's Middle East reporter, Lara Korte, was told she had been fired as well, and Stars and Stripes reported that its publisher, Max Lederer, had also been removed. The Pentagon told the BBC it would not comment.[1]
Slavin says he was given no official explanation and no right of appeal, and that he believes he was fired for having stated in an interview that "in a hypothetical situation, censorship would be a red line". Both he and Korte trace their dismissals to an interview they gave last month to CBS's Sunday Morning programme.[1]
What was the arrangement written to protect?
The arrangement behind that newsroom is unusual and old. Stars and Stripes carries Department of Defense money and, at the same time, an editorial independence secured by a mandate from Congress and by the department's own rules. A newspaper for troops, funded by the institution it covers, needed something in writing to hold the two apart, and the text names the published copy as the thing to be kept out of the department's hands.[1]
Here is the seam. A mandate written about publication reaches the copy and stops at the payroll, while a dismissal for insubordination travels through employment. The three departures this week never had to argue with the text that protects the paper; they went around it. The competing reading deserves to be stated plainly: the removals may be an ordinary personnel dispute over a single interview, with no bearing on the arrangement at all.[1]
Why this week?
The seam has been there all along, so the question is what made it usable now. The Pentagon has not held a press conference since May. In October, leading US outlets, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the BBC among them, refused a policy that would have let journalists into the building only if they reported information the department had authorised. Meanwhile the paper was reporting on conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln, deployed in the Gulf for months and at sea for more than 240 days. Slavin says he does not know whether that reporting is connected to his dismissal.[1]
The coming weeks will show which reading holds. If the editorship is filled by appointment and no text on the mandate is opened in Congress, the seam turns from an oversight into a practice: an institution whose independence lives in one document, and whose staffing sits outside it, stays independent only for as long as the appointments allow. The measurable form of that is plain. By the end of November either a named successor arrives with the mandate untouched, or a legislative text on the paper's independence is introduced.[1]