“Trump has taken over VOA, Radio Free Europe, etc…planting loyalists, firing critical journalists. He can’t do that with Stripes so he’s just…zeroing out the budget.”
By LAURA HAZARD OWEN NiemanLab
Sept. 4, 2020, 11:15 a.m.
The Pentagon has ordered the 159-year-old independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes to come up with a shutdown plan by September 15 and stop publishing by September 30. The news — and a bipartisan group of senators’ plea to save the paper — was reported on Wednesday. This morning, USA Today reported on the memo in which Colonel Paul R. Haverstick, Jr., director of the Defense Media Activity, issued the shutdown order.
The plan for dissolution, due by September 15, should include a “specific timeline for vacating government-owned/leased space worldwide,” he wrote, and “the last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be September 30, 2020.”
At Military.com, Oriana Pawlyk reported:
The Pentagon in February proposed cutting all of the newspaper’s funding — roughly $15.5 million annually — to reallocate those dollars toward other high-profile programs, such as space, nuclear and hypersonic systems, [Defense Secretary Mark Esper] said at the time. The Senate version of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act does not contain funding for the paper; lawmakers will convene this fall to develop a joint version of the bill.
“We trimmed the support for Stars and Stripes because we need to invest that money, as we did with many, many other programs, into higher-priority issues,” he said during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, following DoD’s $740 billion budget submission to Congress. Stars and Stripes is published in print and online.
While the paper, which is distributed to U.S. troops stationed at bases worldwide, maintains editorial independence, it receives federal funding as part of the Pentagon’s Defense Media Agency. About $8.7 million of the subsidy comes through operations and maintenance (O&M) funding, and about $6.9 million from contingency operations funds, Stripes said. The remainder of the Stripes annual budget comes from advertising, subscriptions and sales.
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