Stars and Stripes faces funding cuts

By mid-March, coronavirus response efforts were underway worldwide. President Donald Trump had declared a national emergency. France was in lockdown. And Japanese public schools were closed.

But schools on American military bases in Japan planned to remain open, much to the dismay of nervous parents. Then the news appeared in Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-subsidized but editorially independent newspaper that covers the U.S. armed forces at home and abroad. “School is such an easy place for viruses and germs to spread,” one Navy spouse fretted to the publication, “and it seems like too much of a risk.” A day later, closures were announced.

Stars and Stripes has been chronicling the military angle of the covid-19 crisis for months now: sailors infected on Navy ships, masks purchased for the Department of Defense workforce, stimulus checks cut for veterans. But in the midst of the pandemic, the newspaper faces an unprecedented threat all its own: In February, the Trump administration proposed eliminating all of the publication’s federal support in 2021.

That’s more than $15 million a year, about half its budget. “I can’t think of a graver threat to its independence,” said the paper’s ombudsman, Ernie Gates. “That’s a fatal cut.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper justifies the cut by saying the publication’s money should be spent on “higher-priority issues,” including space and nuclear programs. But considering that Stars and Stripes represents a minuscule fraction of the department’s $705 billion budget, critics see the proposal as consistent with the president’s broader war on journalism.

“It’s another obnoxious assault by the Trump administration on freedom of the press,” said Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a Marine veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, who blasts the defunding plan as “un-American.”

Now Moulton’s committee — and ultimately the rest of Congress — must decide whether to support the appropriation by the fall, preserving a news organization with a unique civic role. This deliberation comes as the coronavirus economic crisis exacerbates the news industry’s financial woes.

Stars and Stripes, which dates back to the Civil War, has published continuously since World War II. In 2010, the paper won a George Polk Award for revealing the Defense Department’s use of a public relations firm that profiled reporters and steered them toward favorable coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

But much of the day-today coverage is news of direct concern to service members and their families: pay and benefits, life on base and in the field, the real people behind the global geopolitics.

The paper is a modern multimedia operation with a website, a social media presence and a couple of podcasts, and the print edition reaches troops in parts of the world where internet access is absent.

“I remember being in al-Anbar and Haditha and picking up Stars and Stripes in the middle of a war zone,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., one of Moulton’s committee colleagues and a fellow Marine veteran. “I didn’t have a cellphone. Access to the internet was very limited. But with every mail delivery there came a Stars and Stripes, and I was able to keep connected to the world.”

The paper’s publisher, Max Lederer, said, “You can give a service member the best gun in the world, but if his mind is elsewhere — if he’s worried about things at home — then he’s not going to be as good a soldier, and part of our role is to provide that information to give him a sense of comfort.”