Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper may or may not have been feeling some public heat lately from his sycophantic backing of Trump's every norm-breaking move, whether it be Trump reaching down to protect war crimes or Trump tear gassing a protest to go for nice little walkies, but none of it is evident in his behavior. Among Esper's other newly held beliefs: The administration is right to demand the total budgetary zeroing out of Stars and Stripes, the armed forces' own newspaper.
The Washington Post notes Esper's support in a piece describing congressional skepticism for the proposal, with Esper claiming that the military should be spending the $15 million per year on "higher-priority issues." The Defense Department budget is $700 billion per year, though, so it ain't that.
The White House proposal to drop federal support for Stars and Stripes to 0%, which would effectively slash the paper's total budget by half, is transparently part of the wider Republican fascist move to eliminate sources of skeptical journalism. In the case of a newspaper devoted to issues faced by troops throughout the world, it means zeroing out the budget; in the case of Voice of America (VoA), the government broadcast effort aimed at providing neutral and accurate news overseas, it has meant installing far-right toadies while stripping authority from the VoA journalism team. We saw it in Vice President Mike Pence's early order for government health experts to route pandemic news through his office, and in the relentless Republican repetition of the truly insane Trump insistence that all news personally embarrassing to him is actually "fake."
Nobody is proposing the elimination of the military's embedded journalism team because they need that $15 million for new cases of fighter jet wax. It's just another move to kill off an outlet that gets too many embarrassing stories, and has the anti-fascist audacity to write them down.
The Post also notes that Congress isn't likely to go along with this move, just as they have been skeptical of every other Team Trump effort to zero out you-name-it in budgets even when Republicans, rather than Democrats, were in charge. But that doesn't mean we should ignore Team Trump's attempt to do it. There's nothing Trump's underlings have touched that they haven't tried to screw up; it is not governance, but orchestrated sabotage.
Stars and Stripes
Founded in 1861 Stars and Stripes is an American military newspaper that focuses and reports on matters concerning the members of the United States Armed Forces. It operates from inside the Department of Defense, but is editorially separate from it, and its First Amendment protection is safeguarded by the United States Congress, to whom an independent ombudsman, who serves the readers' interests, regularly reports. As well as a website, Stars and Stripes publishes four daily print editions for the military service members serving overseas; these European, Middle Eastern, Japanese, and South Korean editions are also available as free downloads in electronic format, and there are also seven digital editions.[1] The newspaper has its headquarters in Washington, D.C
On November 9, 1861, during the Civil War, soldiers of the 11th, 18th, and 29th Illinois Regiments set up camp in the Missouri city of Bloomfield. Finding the local newspaper's office empty, they decided to print a newspaper about their activities. They called it the Stars and Stripes. Today, the Stars and Stripes Museum/Library Association is located in Bloomfield.
Stars and Stripes is authorized by Congress and the US Department of Defense to produce independent daily military news and information distributed at U.S. military installations in Europe and Mideast and East Asia. A weekly derivative product is distributed within the United States by its commercial publishing partners. Stars and Stripes newspaper averages 32 pages each day and is published in tabloid format and online at www.stripes.com/epaper. Stars and Stripes employs civilian reporters, and U.S. military senior non-commissioned officers as reporters, at a number of locations around the world and on any given day has an audience just shy of 1.0 million. Stars and Stripes also serves independent military news and information to an online audience of about 2.0 million unique visitors per month, 60 to 70 percent of whom are located in the United States.
Stars and Stripes is a non-appropriated fund (NAF) organization, only partially subsidized by the Department of Defense. In 2020, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Elaine McCusker indicated its funding would be cut and said: “We have essentially decided that, you know, kind of coming into the modern age that newspaper is probably not the best way that we communicate any longer.”[7] A large portion of its operating costs is earned through the sale of advertising and subscriptions. Unique among the many military publications,
Stars and Stripes operates as a First Amendment newspaper and is part of the newly formed Defense Media Activity. The other entities encompassed by the Defense Media Activity (the DoD News Channel and Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, for example), are command publications of the Department of Defense; only Stars and Stripes maintains complete editorial independence.
Stars and Stripes is in the process of digitizing its World War II editions. Newspaper microfilm from 1949 to 1999 is now in searchable format through a partnership with Heritage Microfilm and has been integrated into an archives website. Newspaper Archive has also more recently made the England, Ireland and Mediterranean editions from World War II available.
In February 2020, President Donald Trump's administration proposed completely eliminating the newspaper's federal support in 2021. The amount is more than $15 million a year, which represents approximately half the publication's budget. It was described by the Stars and Stripes ombudsman as "a fatal cut.
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