Don’t turn the military’s newspaper into a message platform; Stars and Stripes, February 10, 2026

RUFUS FRIDAY | CENTER FOR INTEGRITY IN NEWS REPORTING, Stars and Stripes; Don’t turn the military’s newspaper into a message platform

"There are places where a news organization’s values aren’t just written down, they’re literally inscribed on the walls.

Recently, staff at the Stars and Stripes press facility at Camp Humphreys in South Korea, the largest United States overseas military facility, unveiled a large mural titled “Stars and Stripes’ Core Values.” The words aren’t subtle: Credibility. Impartiality. Truth-telling. Balanced. Accountable.

Those aren’t marketing slogans. They are the compact between a newsroom and its readers, and especially important when the readership is the U.S. military community, often far from home, often in harm’s way.

That is why the Department of Defense’s recent posture toward Stars and Stripes is so alarming.

According to reporting by The Associated Press and other news organizations, the Pentagon said in a public statement by a spokesperson for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that it would “refocus” Stars and Stripes away from certain subject areas and toward content “custom tailored to our warfighters,” including weapons systems, fitness, lethality and related themes. The same reporting describes proposed steps such as removing content from wire services like the AP and Reuters and having a significant portion of content produced by the Pentagon itself.

Stars and Stripes is unusual and intentionally structured as-so on purpose. The paper’s own “About” page states plainly that it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command,” and “unique among Department of Defense authorized news outlets” in being “governed by the principles of the First Amendment.” 

In August 2025, Stars and Stripes took a step that I believe should be studied by every news organization trying to rebuild trust: it adopted and published a statement of core values emphasizing credibility and impartiality, and drawing a bright line between news and opinion. 

When a government authority suddenly declares that a news outlet must abandon certain viewpoints and then signals it will take a more hands-on role in shaping editorial operations, it sends a clear message to readers: the outlet is being pressured to produce coverage that satisfies those in power, rather than reporting grounded in facts.

No serious newsroom can sustain trust under that condition, which is already in dangerously short supply. Gallup reports that Americans’ confidence in mass media has fallen to historic lows, with just 28% expressing a great deal or fair amount of trust. When Gallup began measuring media trust in the 1970s, that figure routinely exceeded two-thirds of the public.

If our nation is struggling to persuade people that journalism is independent, accurate, objective, impartial and not an instrument of power, why would we take one of the country’s most symbolically important newsrooms, an outlet serving people in uniform, and wrap it more tightly inside the very institution it is entrusted to cover?

Last fall, I was in Japan for the 80th anniversary celebration of the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes. In a detailed first-person account, the gala’s keynote speaker, journalist Steve Herman, described the paper’s long history of resisting becoming a “propaganda rag,” including General Eisenhower’s defense of the paper’s independence. 

That history matters because it explains why generations of commanders tolerated uncomfortable stories: a paper that service members trust does more for cohesion and legitimacy than one that reads like a propaganda platform for approved narratives.

The Stars and Stripes values statement puts it plainly: “Credibility is the greatest asset of any news medium,” and impartiality is its “greatest source of credibility.” It describes truth-telling as the core mission, accountability as a discipline, and it emphasizes the strict separation between news and opinion. 

Those principles are neither ideological nor hostile to the military. They are the foundational principles of a free press, and they are especially important when the audience is made up of people who swear an oath to uphold the Constitution.

The Americans who serve in our Armed Forces deserve more than information that flatters authority.

They deserve journalism that respects them enough to tell the truth.

That mural in South Korea has it right. Credibility. Impartiality. Truth-telling. Balanced. Accountable.

We should treat those words as a promise kept and a commitment upheld.

Rufus Friday serves as chairman of the Stars and Stripes publisher advisory board of directors and is the former publisher of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Lexington, Kentucky. Currently he is the executive director of the Center for Integrity in News Reporting."

Frantic Stephen Miller Tries Shifting Blame for Minneapolis Disaster; The Daily Beast, January 28, 2026

Catherine Bouris , The Daily Beast; Frantic Stephen Miller Tries Shifting Blame for Minneapolis Disaster

"Stephen Miller is seeking to shift blame for the death of Alex Pretti at the hands of Customs and Border Patrol agents away from himself and back onto Kristi Noem.

The White House deputy chief of staff released a statement to CNN just hours after Homeland Security Secretary Noem appeared to draw battle lines, throwing 40-year-old Miller under the bus...

Miller, the president’s top aide in the White House, is widely considered the architect of the aggressive immigration crackdown that has quickly come to define President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

Miller’s hint at an investigation or evaluation into the agents involved in the Saturday killing of Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, is a departure from prior inflammatory comments in which he labelled Pretti a “would-be assassin.”...

Miller seeking to distance himself and the White House from the actions of the agents involved in Pretti’s killing suggests that Noem is not the only senior Trump official trying to emerge unscathed, particularly as the public backlash against him continues to grow.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in a Tuesday editorial that Miller’s immigration policies are costing the White House credibility and “building distrust.”"

Dan Bongino Admits to Lying During His Pundit Days; The Atlantic, December 8, 2025

David A. Graham , The Atlantic; Dan Bongino Admits to Lying During His Pundit Days

"The suspect, Brian Cole Jr., reportedly recently told investigators that he was a Donald Trump supporter who believed Trump’s bogus claims of fraud in the 2020 election. But various people in conservative media and politics have insisted for years that the pipe bombs were actually planned or placed by the government in order to make Trump look bad—which was why no one had been apprehended.

One of the most prominent backers of that claim was the podcaster and radio host Dan Bongino. Even the Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of the administration’s most sycophantic pundits, had to point this out during an interview on Thursday night, noting that before joining the FBI, Bongino had called the bombs an “inside job.” Bongino’s answer was astonishing.

“I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I will be back in that space—but that’s not what I’m paid for now,” he said. “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”"

Inside Trump’s Deportation of Venezuelans: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison; The New York Times, November 8, 2025

Julie Turkewitz, Tibisay Romero, Sheyla Urdaneta, and Isayen Herrera

Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez

, The New York Times; Inside Trump’s Deportation of Venezuelans: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison 

"But the men received little to no due process before being expelled to the terrorism prison in El Salvador, and they were abruptly released in July, part of a larger diplomatic deal that included the release of 10 Americans and U.S. residents held in Venezuela.

Mr. Trump, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September, praised Salvadoran officials for “the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country.”

In interviews, however, the men sent to the prison described frequent, intense physical and psychological abuse. Beyond the beatings, tear gas and trips to the isolation room, the men said they were mocked or ignored by medical personnel, forced to spend 24 hours a day under harsh lights and made to drink from wells of fetid water.

The New York Times interviewed 40 of the former prisoners, many at their homes in cities and towns across Venezuela. We then asked a group of independent forensic experts who help investigate torture allegations to assess the credibility of the men’s testimony.

Several doctors from that team, known as the Independent Forensic Expert Group, said the men’s testimonies, along with photographs of what they described as their injuries, were consistent and credible, providing “compelling evidence” to support accusations of torture. The group’s assessments in other cases have been used in courts around the world...

The forensic experts said that they were struck by how similar the men’s allegations were. The former prisoners, each interviewed separately, described the same timeline and methods of abuse, with many of the same details.

When such “identical methods of abuse” are described by multiple people, the experts wrote in their assessment, it “often indicates the existence of an institutional policy and practice of torture.”

Presented with the men’s accusations and the experts’ findings, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”

The USTA’s censorship of Trump dissent at the US Open is cowardly, hypocritical and un-American; The Guardian, September 7, 2025

Bryan Armen Graham , The Guardian ; The USTA’s censorship of Trump dissent at the US Open is cowardly, hypocritical and un-American

"When the dust finally settles in the days after Sunday’s eagerly awaited US Open men’s final, the United States Tennis Association will issue its annual victory-lap press release. It will tout another record-setting Open: more than a million fans through the gates, unprecedented social-media engagement, double-digit growth in food and beverage sales, and hundreds of celebrities packed into suites from Rolex to Ralph Lauren. It will beam about growing the game, championing diversity and turning Flushing Meadows into a pop-culture destination.

But for all the milestones the USTA is preparing to celebrate, this year’s tournament will be remembered for a different kind of first: the governing body’s lamentable decision to ask broadcasters not to show dissent against Donald Trump. In making that pre-emptive concession, the USTA has committed an unforced error that can’t be undone: sacrificing authenticity and credibility in order to shield a politician – any politician, regardless of party, ideology or affiliation – from the sound of public disapproval.

According to internal emails obtained by outlets including PA and Bounces, the USTA instructed its television partners to “refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions” when Trump appears on screen during Sunday’s final. A separate note reminded staff he would be seated in Rolex’s suite as a client guest. The 11-word statement to the Guardian on Saturday night from a USTA spokesperson – “We regularly ask our broadcasters to refrain from showcasing off-court disruptions” – is so weak it could buckle under the weight of its own hypocrisy. (Rolex did not respond to a request for comment.)"

The A.O.C. Deepfake Was Terrible. The Proposed Solution Is Delusional.; The New York Times, August 11, 2025

Zeynep Tufekci , The New York Times; The A.O.C. Deepfake Was Terrible. The Proposed Solution Is Delusional.

"The other crucial thing that the abundance of such easily generated information makes scarce is credibility. And that is nowhere more stark than in the case of photos, audio and video, because they are among the key mechanisms with which we judge claims about reality. Lose that, lose reality.

It would be nice if, like members of Congress or large media organizations, we all had a large staff who could be dispatched to disprove false claims and protect our reputations and in that small way buttress the sanctity of facts. Since we don’t, we need to find other models that we can all access. Scientists and parts of the tech industry have come up with a few very promising frameworks — known as zero-knowledge proofs, secure enclaves, hardware authentication tokens using public key cryptography, distributed ledgers, for example — about which there is much more to say at another moment. Many other tools may yet arise. But unless we start taking the need seriously now before we lose what’s left of proof of authenticity and verification, governments will step right into the void. If the governments are not run by authoritarians already, it probably won’t take long till they are."

How To Avoid AI Misinformation: 2 Essential Steps For Smarter Research; Forbes, November 21, 2024

 Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D., Forbes; How To Avoid AI Misinformation: 2 Essential Steps For Smarter Research

"AI can be a powerful ally or a risky gamble, depending on how you use it. If you’re relying on AI for research, taking shortcuts can backfire—and cost you your credibility. To avoid AI misinformation, follow these two essential steps:

1. Ask for references.
2. Verify those references yourself.

Here’s why these steps are critical."

Video Clip: The Death of Truth; C-Span, June 9, 2024

 C-Span; Video Clip: The Death of Truth

"Steven Brill, a journalist and NewsGuard Co-CEO, talked about his new book on online misinformation and social media, and their impact on U.S. politics and democracy."

Andrew Gillum’s Florida Ethics Troubles Just Got Worse; Slate, January 25, 2019

Mark Joseph Stern, Slate; Andrew Gillum’s Florida Ethics Troubles Just Got Worse

"However Gillum chooses to proceed, it’s clear that Friday’s findings undermine his account and, by extension, his credibility. Throughout the campaign, he insisted that he paid his share of the lavish excursions and never accepted gifts from lobbyists. That narrative is now almost impossible to believe. True, Gillum never performed favors for lobbyists in exchange for their largesse, which would be a federal offense. But even without a quid pro quo, his cozy relationship with lobbyists did not seem to comport with Florida law.

Should Gillum run for office down the road, this blunder will likely be used as a cudgel, risking his ability to win a primary, let alone a general election. Perhaps it is too soon to write off his political career. But if he ever again throws his hat in the ring, his opponents will be ready to pounce with a sordid—and substantiated—tale of corruption."

Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director; Huffington Post, April 2, 2018

Aaron Weiss, Huffington Post; Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director

"Only Sinclair forces those trusted local journalists to lend their credibility to shoddy reporting and commentary that, if it ran in other countries, we would rightly dismiss as state propaganda...

When Deadspin’s genius supercut of Sinclair’s latest promo went viral last weekend, my heart broke for the anchors who were used to make the equivalent of a proof-of-life hostage video. They know what they’re being conscripted to do, but most of them have no choice in the matter. They’re trapped by contracts, by family obligations and by an industry that is struggling to stay relevant in an era of changing media habits.

The anchors who were forced to decry “fake news” put their own credibility on the line, accusing “some members of the media” of pushing “their own personal bias and agenda,” when nothing could be further from the truth...

There’s nothing inherently wrong with journalism that wears its bias on its sleeve. At some point, local news may transform into something more like the cable news landscape, with hosts who are paid to share their perspective and commentary. But that requires honesty on the part of station owners, and it requires embracing a diversity of viewpoints on the air. That’s the exact opposite of what Sinclair is doing to local broadcasting today."

CDC Director’s Investment in Tobacco, Drug Companies Baffles Ethics Experts; Scientific American, February 1, 2018

Helen Branswell, Scientific American; CDC Director’s Investment in Tobacco, Drug Companies Baffles Ethics Experts

"“The problem with Brenda Fitzgerald is like many in the Trump administration, she was very negligent at submitting her personal financial disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics and finally worked out an ethics agreement with OGE very late in her term,” Holman said.

“So without that sort of ethics guidance from the Office of Government Ethics, and no ethics agreement signed, Fitzgerald just operated as if she were a regular citizen, trading and buying in stocks that pose a direct conflict of interest for her role as CDC director,” he said.

Holman and Giordano seemed genuinely flummoxed that Fitzgerald would buy shares in companies that might present a conflict of interest while serving as CDC director.

“That really represents, I think, a failure of an ethical compass,” Giordano said. “It is a question of credibility. And it is a question of responsible leadership.”"

Outgoing Ethics Chief: U.S. Is ‘Close to a Laughingstock’; New York Times, July 17, 2017

Eric Lipton and Nicholas Fandos, New York Times; Outgoing Ethics Chief: U.S. Is ‘Close to a Laughingstock’

"Walter M. Shaub Jr., who is resigning as the federal government’s top ethics watchdog on Tuesday, said the Trump administration had flouted or directly challenged long-accepted norms in a way that threatened to undermine the United States’ ethical standards, which have been admired around the world.

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility,” Mr. Shaub said in a two-hour interview this past weekend — a weekend Mr. Trump let the world know he was spending at a family-owned golf club that was being paid to host the U.S. Women’s Open tournament. “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.”

Mr. Shaub called for nearly a dozen legal changes to strengthen the federal ethics system: changes that, in many cases, he had not considered necessary before Mr. Trump’s election. Every other president since the 1970s, Republican or Democrat, worked closely with the ethics office, he said."

Comey’s testimony changed everything — and not in Trump’s favor; Washington Post, June 9, 2017

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post; Comey’s testimony changed everything — and not in Trump’s favor

"Before Comey, Republicans and Democrats had many bones to pick with Comey. After Comey, both sides avoid questioning his integrity. Republicans carped about his refusal to rebuke the president in the Oval Office (for a group that has never seriously confronted Trump on much of anything, this is rich). They made hay out of — gasp!– a leak of unclassified materials after Comey was fired. Not once, however, did any senator say he disbelieved Comey’s account or try to shake his recollection. Aspects of Comey’s factual account can be supported now by others, which will further bolster his own credibility and diminish Trump’s. Comey may be prickly, overly concerned with his own reputation and even a little schoolmarmish, but few will argue that he is a liar."

Deputy attorney general appoints special counsel to oversee probe of Russian interference in election; Washington Post, May 17, 2017

Devlin Barrett, Sari Horwitz and Matt Zapotosky, Washington Post; Deputy attorney general appoints special counsel to oversee probe of Russian interference in election

"The Justice Department has decided to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible coordination between Trump associates and Russian officials seeking to meddle in last year’s election, according to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

Robert Mueller, a former prosecutor who served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013, has agreed to serve in the role, Rosenstein said."

At Trump Hotel in Washington, Champagne Toasts in an Ethical ‘Minefield’; New York Times; 1/19/17

Eric Lipton and Susanne Craig, New York Times; 

At Trump Hotel in Washington, Champagne Toasts in an Ethical ‘Minefield’

"The lease between the General Services Administration and the Trump company includes a clause — “no member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom” — that federal contract experts say makes clear that Mr. Trump will be in violation of the deal as soon as he is sworn in.

“The basic integrity and credibility of the president of the United States of the federal procurement and contracting regime is at risk,” said Steven L. Schooner, a professor specializing in government procurement law at George Washington University. “We are about to have a legitimate scandal on our hands.”"

Donald and Billy on the Bus; New York Times, 10/8/16

Lindy West, New York Times; Donald and Billy on the Bus:

"If you have spent your career brutalizing and dehumanizing women legislatively rather than personally, you are no better. If you were happy to overlook months of violent racism, xenophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia from the Trump campaign, but now you’re mad that he used a bad word and tried to sleep with another man’s wife, you are no better. If you have derided and stigmatized identity politics in an effort to keep the marginalized from organizing, you are no better. If you snicker or say nothing while your fellow men behave like Donald Trump, you are no better.

The truth is that all of you have failed women for generations, and you deserve to lose our votes. Next month we will grab you where it hurts. By your ballots."