I’m sure former Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth, now the secretary of defense, or war, or whatever, fancies himself an expert on journalism.
But the violence that his department did last week to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes is one of the best demonstrations I’ve ever seen of why it’s a mistake to put people in charge of a newspaper who aren’t qualified to throw them on people’s lawns.
Among the casualties of Hegseth’s ongoing war against truth is reporter Lara Korte, who cut her journalistic teeth here at The Wichita Eagle and later at our sister paper, the Kansas City Star.
We’ve had a lot of interns at The Eagle in my 28 years here. Many have gone on to great things.
But I can’t say I’ve ever been prouder of one than I am today for Korte, who deserves a medal instead of getting fired, for defending independent journalism and the 1st Amendment.
Korte’s alleged firing offense was saying this in a CBS interview: “I’m working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”
That’s been the policy of Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon for decades.
But Hegseth’s toadies called it “insubordination,” in the email they sent firing her — a false claim they also leveled when they simultaneously sacked Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, for saying that government censorship of the paper would be a “red line” for him.
The cub reporter
Korte started writing for us in 2014 at age 17, while she was still editor of the school paper at Wichita’s Bishop Carroll High School.
Former Eagle editor Tom Shine — an incredible judge of young talent — had given a presentation at the high school, and Korte asked him if he could give her some career advice and coaching in newspaper style rules.
He put her to work assembling calendars and lists, occasionally small feature stories.
I’m working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.
Lara Korte, in an interview with CBS
“I think I wrote one about the Sedgwick County Fair one summer that was riddled with errors,” she said in a Messenger chat with me, reminiscing on how green she was at the time.
Korte was hired as a paid intern for the summer of 2016, between her freshman and sophomore years in journalism school at the University of Kansas. That was the year of the Black Lives Matter movement, and she was among our boots on the ground covering the protests.
She wrote a truly compelling series of stories about Brian Bergkamp, a Catholic seminarian on his own summer internship at the Lord’s Diner, who was swept away and later found drowned after rescuing a woman in a kayak accident on the Arkansas River.
