Pentagon fires Kansas journalist at Stars and Stripes in latest chapter of government censorship

Lara Korte graduated from the University of Kansas' William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She reported for Stars and Stripes and was fired on Friday. (Photo submitted by Lara Korte)

When I read the headline, something told me that it referred to one of my former University of Kansas journalism students. 

“Pentagon fires Stars and Stripes editor, publisher and reporter” 

And so it did. 

Lara Korte, a 2019 University of Kansas graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, was fired Friday from the military publication “Stars and Stripes.” After she and her editor appeared on CBS News, the Pentagon fired both on the same day.

Korte said the notice she received labeled her broadcast comments as “insubordination.”

“Specifically, it singled out a phrase where I said I work for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon, not the administration and not any policy maker,” Korte wrote to me in an email from Germany after the firing. “My understanding in that context is that I was reaffirming Pentagon policy about Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence.”

In the process, one of Kansas’s best and brightest lost her job, another casualty in the Trump administration’s targeting of the press and facts. 

Korte grew up in Colwich, attended Bishop Carroll Catholic High School and worked for Kansas publications, including the University Daily Kansan and the Wichita Eagle.

During her time at KU, Korte was a juggernaut. Her investigative work for the student newspaper showed fellow students how to do watchdog reporting: articles about sexual assault, budgetary gambles, fraternity hazing and white nationalism on campus. 

“It’s very easy to look at the world and feel helpless when you see injustice,” Korte wrote to me, “and journalism, to me, was a chance to jump into the fray, dig into the facts, and make sure our public officials were being held to high standards. I never felt like any topic or subject was off limits — if it mattered to the public, it mattered to me.”

She wrote or contributed to more than 200 articles for the Daily Kansan — an extraordinary number in recent years — while advancing from reporter to news editor to editor-in-chief.   

“That training was indispensable for my career as a journalist,” Korte wrote. “It’s where I grew a spine.”

Having taught thousands of Jayhawks, I struggle to remember many individual students. Not so with Lara. Almost 10 years after she was in my classroom, I still use one of her projects as a classroom example.

From Germany, Korte has defended her work and confusion at being fired in interviews since Friday with National Public Radio and CBS News.  

Before her firing Friday, Korte said she “had received no complaints or concerns from Pentagon officials about my coverage.”

We’ve seen quite a bit of this during the last few years.

Public broadcasting was kneecapped when Trump resumed the presidency in 2025 by politicized cuts that threatened the very existence of PBS and NPR. On network TV, the credentialing power of the FCC hung over the heads of late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert in an effort to make their bosses quake and retreat. Lawsuits from Trump cowed the ABC and CBS networks to settle cases that media lawyers saw as frivolous. 

The only sign of the Trump administration not getting what it wants: A court rebuffed the Department of Defense’s effort to restrict reporters within the Pentagon — but only after the policy was in effect for more than eight months.

During the past two years, the federal government repeatedly has aimed its BB gun at free expression. Ping. It knocks down independent journalists. Ping. It picks off responsible public media outlets. Ping. Ping.

Imagine if someone stepped in front of this petulant, armed child, wrenching back the BB gun. Even more fantastical, imagine if Congress — the ultimate absentee parent — was the one to act.

The Trumpian pattern of censorship and intimidation seems pulled from a playbook. Consider the particular media the Trump administration has challenged. Both public broadcasting and Stars and Stripes have complex, if not blurry, combinations of funding and editorial control.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was the independent, parent company for public television and public radio. 

But the CPB was partially funded by Congress. How does that work?

The Department of Defense explains that Stars and Stripes should provide military “personnel with an independent source of news and information through the Stars and Stripes Media Organization.”

But Korte and her editor could be fired. Why is that permitted?

If you need proof that the relationship between the Department of Defense and Stars and Stripes is confusing, see this 17-page instruction document with a table of contents and glossary. Two pages of references point to obscure and arcane manuals, such as “DoD Manual 8910.01, Volume 2, ‘DoD Information Collections Manual: Procedures for DoD Public Information Collections,’ June 30, 2014, as amended.”

For both public broadcasting and Stars and Stripes, there was and still is a hazy, refutable system of quasi-independence. Basically, press freedom was a norm waiting to be broken by an administration brazen enough to do so.

I am not sure that many Americans understand this narrow parsing of journalistic independence and funding. (I’m not sure that I do.) Our popular confusion makes it easier for the Trump administration to quash journalistic operations, fire employees and steer coverage. The Trump administration likely sees this nebulous region of public journalism as a place to wedge its crowbar and pry for leverage.

Korte sees something different. She sees virtue in public journalism.

“The United States has always viewed freedom of the press and freedom of speech as foundational rights for Americans,” Korte wrote, “and I believe public funding for various independent media outlets like PBS, Stars and Stripes and Voice of America is an expression of those values. To me, it’s a show to the American people that the government believes in their individual right to information.”

With free expression crises multiplying, free expression has become tenuous for journalists who rely on the government to do their job. We assumed that the First Amendment was a robust bulwark — a law that would protect responsible, publicly supported journalists. That’s what we were taught from elementary school on.

Instead, we find the Trump administration plinking down media outlets one by one with its mischievous, bullying BB gun of censorship.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.