This is the Omn Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Stars and Stripes, the venerated independent award-winning newspaper that has served the armed services for roughly a century,

may be getting an uninvited makeover, courtesy of Pete Hegseth's Defense Department. In a statement posted on

X earlier this month, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that Stars and Stripes would no

longer be carrying wire reports from the studiously impartial AP, and that it would steer away from

all that is woke or might sap morale.

Parnell said the Defense Department would be bringing the newspaper quote into the 21st century.

It may happen, so far there have only been the posts and one anonymous report,

but as someone who's been hosting this show for that entire century, I can only testify that it hasn't been the best for journalism.

This was a complete surprise to us.

Eric Slavin is the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes.

To this point, we still have not spoken directly with the Pentagon, although we would certainly welcome a

chance to sit down and discuss what we do.

Parnell wrote, quote, Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters.

It will focus on weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability.

No more repurposed DC gossip columns, no more

associated press reprints. How do you envision that change? It's difficult to say exactly what

they're referring to. No other news organization that I'm aware of is on the ground in a lot of

remote bases throughout Europe and

the Pacific providing really granular military news. We have used wire stories to round that coverage

out because we can't be everywhere at once. And we think that, for example, a soldier who's out

in a very remote area in the desert might want to know what happened with the NFL.

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