The Pentagon recently ousted the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes’s ombudsman, the person meant to monitor the outlet’s editorial independence and report concerns to Congress.
“Apparently the Pentagon also doesn’t want you to hear from me anymore about threats to the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They fired me,” Jacqueline Smith, wrote Thursday in an op-ed published in the newspaper.
Smith said Defense officials gave no reason for her ouster, set officially for April 28, and that she was told the action “is not grievable.”
The ombudsman role for the publication, which Smith took on in December 2023, is meant to serve as a watchdog monitoring the paper’s independence. Congress created the position in 1991 after military personnel in the late 1980s attempted on multiple occasions to suppress unfavorable news of the Iran-Contra affair and other issues, she wrote, adding that the ombudsman must report to lawmakers at least once a year.
“As required, I have told the House and Senate Armed Services committees in recent months of my great and growing concern about attempted control of the newspaper by the Pentagon,” Smith wrote.
“No one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence,” she added in the op-ed.
The firing follows months of overhaul at the paper, which receives half its funding from the Pentagon but maintains editorial independence from Defense Department leadership.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on Jan. 15 announced the department would modernize the paper’s operations, “refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.”
Since that decree, Smith said she had been outspoken in her columns, media interviews, talks with national free press groups, and communications with Congress about the Pentagon’s moves to take control of Stripes’s content.
She had also been critical of a March 9 directive from Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg that banned the use of “news stories, features, syndicated columns, comic strips and editorial cartoons from commercial news media” in Stars and Stripes.
“Pete Hegseth doesn’t want you to see cartoons in this newspaper anymore,” she wrote in a separate column.
After House and Senate lawmakers reached out to Pentagon leadership voicing their concerns of censorship at the paper — including an April 15 letter led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) to Hegseth expressing “great alarm” about reports of political interference with the editorial independence — Smith was fired six days later.
“I think that Hegseth and company are trying to get around Congress by not eliminating the position, just getting rid of the outspoken present ombudsman,” the outgoing ombudsman wrote. “I knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news, but I expected some communication or questions or warning first. Nothing.”
Smith’s three-year term was set to expire at the end of 2026, but, “They couldn’t wait,” she added.
The changes at Stars and Stripes are part of a series of actions meant to restrict Pentagon reporters under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has sought to bar certain journalists from the building and set limits on how they seek out information from government sources.
A judge has ruled twice against the restrictions, which the Pentagon has appealed.
Press freedom advocacy group PEN America later called on Congress to “step in now” that Smith had been fired.
Smith “has been fired for doing exactly what Congress intended Stars and Stripes’ ombudsman to do — protecting the independence the publication has held for decades,” Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director with the group, said in a statement Friday. “Even as the nation is at war, Pentagon leadership is silencing independent voices that uphold credible reporting, part of a broader pattern of restricting press access to evade scrutiny.”
He added: “Congress must defend the statutory independence of Stars and Stripes so that service members can continue to rely on it for independent reporting.”
Updated at 2:30 p.m. EDT.
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