The Pentagon has fired the person responsible for monitoring the editorial independence of its own military publication, Stars and Stripes.
“Apparently the Pentagon also doesn’t want you to hear from me anymore about threats to the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They fired me,” Jacqueline Smith, the paper’s ombudsman, wrote Thursday in an op-ed.
In her final column, titled “The Pentagon is trying to silence me,” Smith said that she had received notice on Thursday that her last day in the role would be April 28, due to a mandatory five-day notice period.
No reason had been given for her sudden departure, she said, though Pentagon officials had told her, “This action is not grievable.”
“No one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence,” Smith wrote. “For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.”
The Stars and Stripes ombudsman serves as the watchdog for the paper and was created by Congress in 1991 following attempts by military personnel to suppress unfavorable reporting about the Iran-Contra affair – a political scandal in the 1980s that centered around arms trafficking to Iran facilitated by the Reagan administration.
Since then, ombudsmen are required to report to lawmakers annually.
“As required, I have told the House and Senate Armed Services committees in recent months of my great and growing concern about attempted control of the newspaper by the Pentagon,” Smith, who took the position in 2023, wrote.
She appeared on CNN on Friday evening to discuss her firing.
“I think that there's a very real threat to their editorial independence. I think the Pentagon is taking steps to try to control the message through various ways, to have more public affairs content, for example, to remove the requirement that the publisher is a civilian, so they could put, you know, perhaps a military person in there,” she said.
Smith was also critical of Hegseth’s overt embrace of Christianity at the Pentagon.
“It seems to me that the Bible has no place in the running of the Pentagon. The troops are made up of people of many different faiths, many different religions, some no religion. So to focus on only one, I think, is very inappropriate,” she added.
The Independent has contacted the Pentagon for comment on Smith’s dismissal.
Stars and Stripes is funded by the Department of Defense but is supposed to maintain editorial independence. However, recent months have seen a drastic overhaul, including changes announced by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell intended to “refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale.”
As a result, Smith had become more outspoken in her columns and in media interviews more broadly.
In March, she also criticized a department directive that banned the use of “news stories, features, syndicated columns, comic strips and editorial cartoons from commercial news media” in Stars and Stripes editions.
“Pete Hegseth doesn’t want you to see cartoons in this newspaper anymore,” Smith wrote.
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