On Friday the Pentagon fired the top editor, the publisher and a reporter of Stars and Stripes — the military paper whose editorial independence is written into law — for "insubordination." The insubordination: editor-in-chief Erik Slavin told CBS that censoring news for service members "would constitute a red line," and reporter Lara Korte said "I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon." They said journalism things, out loud, and got separation notices for it. * Here's the headline AP's wire put on that: "Stars and Stripes editor says he has been fired for insubordination after doing interview." * Take it apart. "Says he has been fired" — the separation notices are documents; nobody, including the Pentagon, disputed they exist. But the firing gets filed as the guy's claim, like he wandered into the newsroom insisting he'd seen a ghost. And the cause of it all: "after doing interview." Not what he said in the interview — the story — but the mere act of having done one. Fired after doing interview. Hospitalized after eating food. You can commit journalism in an AP headline, apparently, as long as nobody finds out what you committed. * The painful part is that AP's own article is genuinely good. Its first sentence: "The Pentagon on Friday dismissed the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes and a top reporter for insubordination after they publicly opposed potential Defense Department interference" — and it calls the firings "the latest escalation by an administration increasingly confrontational toward news media." The body has everything the headline didn't: the ombudsman fired earlier, a Navy captain installed over the publisher's head, and the Pentagon's stated vision of a paper about "warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability" instead of what its leadership calls "woke distractions." The reporter did the job. The headline shielded the subject. * And someone at AP knew it, because the version on apnews.com now reads: "Pentagon fires Stars and Stripes' top editor, publisher and a reporter." Actor restored, verb restored, 'says' deleted. Good fix. One problem: wires don't work like websites. The first draft went out to member papers across the country — and it's still sitting there today, on the Boston Globe, on local TV sites, in Santa Rosa — frozen at the exact moment AP was at its most careful. A wire headline's first version isn't a draft. It's the edition. * Regulars know we keep a file on this wire. Three days ago it heard a "launch" in an army finally admitting it had fired on the car a six-year-old girl was killed in. The pattern is consistent: AP's second look usually finds the spine — it's the reflex on first contact with power that goes soft. And here's what makes this one sting: AP's own body copy lists the outlets this administration has gone after — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press. The wire is in the story. Those were its own colleagues holding the red line. First draft still called it a thing a guy says happened to him after doing interview. * When a government fires journalists for saying they're journalists, the headline is not a place for a chaperone. 'After doing interview' isn't caution. It's cover.