The Pentagon has been trying to clean up one of its own news operations for months.
Three staffers fought back in court and lost the first round.
And Pete Hegseth just won a court battle that left the fake news media red with rage.
What Happened Inside the Courtroom
US District Judge Trevor McFadden, nominated to the bench by President Donald Trump, refused to block the Pentagon from firing Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, and Middle East reporter Lara Korte.
The three had sued the Defense Department and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, arguing their terminations violated their First Amendment free speech rights.
McFadden was not persuaded.
In a 24-page ruling, he found the journalists were unlikely to successfully prove the Pentagon violated the First Amendment, writing that Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence “is not at stake here.”
The core legal question was whether Slavin and Korte spoke as private citizens or as public employees carrying out their official duties when they sat for a CBS News interview. Prior Supreme Court precedent holds that government employees lose certain First Amendment protections when their speech is made as part of their official job functions rather than as private individuals.
McFadden concluded it was the latter. “They are being fired for giving pre-approved interviews on their paper’s behalf in which they largely toed the company line,” he wrote. “Whatever else such a scheme may violate, it does not clearly offend the First Amendment.”
The plaintiffs had argued their firing would chill protected speech at the paper. McFadden rejected that too: “Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate a chill here.”
The CBS Interview That Started It All
The firings trace back to a segment on *CBS Sunday Morning* that aired in July. Slavin and Korte both appeared in the piece, which focused on Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence and the Pentagon’s efforts to reshape the outlet.
Slavin said in the interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line. “According to the notice, I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line,” Slavin said. “The Pentagon’s public affairs office has charged me with insubordination.”
Korte’s statement in the same segment was equally direct: “I’m working for Stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”
Both received separation notices in August, charged with insubordination. The notices came the day after Stars and Stripes published a piece by reporter Alison Bath detailing food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, and mental health struggles aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that had been deployed for nine months without a port call.
Pentagon attorneys argued in court that the separation notices for Slavin and Korte had been prepared weeks before the Abraham Lincoln story ever ran, calling any link between the two a “red herring.” McFadden agreed with that framing in his ruling, noting that Lederer had received Pentagon criticism about the CBS interview before the Lincoln story was even published. He did acknowledge the timing was “bizarre” and said both sides had case law to support their positions as the lawsuit proceeds.
Lederer’s situation was separate. He was dismissed shortly after announcing his impending retirement and said the Pentagon had installed a new deputy publisher, an active-duty service member, under him at the newspaper without his knowledge. He refused to deliver the separation notices to Slavin and Korte when Pentagon officials ordered him to do so, and was fired before he could formally retire.
How the Pentagon Got Here
The backstory on this goes back to January, when chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted on X that Stars and Stripes would be returning to its “original mission: reporting for our warfighters.” Parnell said the department would “modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.”
Parnell added that the paper would “focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”
That announcement set off a months-long battle over what Stars and Stripes is supposed to be and who it is supposed to answer to. The paper traces its roots to the Civil War, has reported on American military life since World War II, and roughly half its budget comes from the Pentagon. Its own mission statement says it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command” and governed by the principles of the First Amendment.
But the paper’s staff are considered Defense Department employees. That legal reality is what McFadden’s ruling turned on.
In April, the Pentagon had already fired Jacqueline Smith, the paper’s ombudsman, whose congressionally mandated role was to safeguard editorial independence. Smith wrote publicly that she had been outspoken in columns and media interviews about the Pentagon’s moves to take control of the paper’s content. Her firing came after she raised those concerns.
President Trump called Stars and Stripes reporting on the Abraham Lincoln “fake news.”
The lawsuit names Hegseth, Parnell, and Pentagon public affairs official Andrew Brey as defendants. Justice Department attorneys squared off against the three journalists’ legal team in federal court before McFadden issued his ruling.
The fired journalists said their case is not primarily about them but about whether service members can rely on a free and independent press and whether journalists at Stars and Stripes can do their jobs without fear of retaliation.
The ruling does not end the lawsuit. It only means the firings can proceed while the case works through the courts.
What This Actually Means
There is a genuine tension here worth naming plainly. Stars and Stripes has served American troops for generations, and service members stationed overseas deserve accurate, complete reporting on matters that affect their lives, their safety, and their families. Nobody serious disputes that.
And the Pentagon’s move to strip out wire service content, ban comics, and install active-duty military personnel in editorial roles raises real questions about what kind of journalism the paper will produce going forward. Those are fair concerns.
But the legal question McFadden answered is narrower than the cultural one. When government employees give interviews on behalf of their employer, using pre-approved access, they are not speaking as private citizens in the constitutional sense. The Supreme Court has said so repeatedly. McFadden applied that precedent.
The press corps treating this ruling as a scandal would do well to remember that the same First Amendment framework they are invoking here has also been used to protect government employees who were fired for speech that the Left found inconvenient. The principle cuts in multiple directions.
What the Pentagon is actually doing is something the Trump administration has pursued across multiple fronts: bringing government-funded media operations under tighter alignment with the administration’s priorities. Whether that is good policy for the troops is a legitimate debate. Whether it violates the First Amendment, at least under the legal theory Slavin and Korte advanced, is what a federal judge just weighed in on, and the answer was no.
The lawsuit continues. McFadden himself noted the timing of events was “bizarre” and acknowledged both sides had legal arguments worth hearing. This is not over.
But the framing from the establishment press, which has treated this as a straightforward censorship story, misses the complexity. Stars and Stripes is partially funded by taxpayers, its staff are federal employees, and the Defense Department has statutory authority over the organization’s structure. The journalists who work there do important work. They are also not operating in the same legal position as a fully independent newsroom.
Service members deserve honest reporting. And the question of who controls a government-funded news outlet, and what that means for the people it serves, is one the courts are still working through.
Sources: Politico, CBS News, Stars and Stripes, Washington Examiner, WTOP, NOTUS