Ken LaCorte

LaCorte graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1987. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he worked as a media consultant for over a hundred companies and candidates in the United States and internationally, including presidential campaigns in Colombia, Guatemala and Venezuela.

In 1997, he challenged California law by publishing the state's Megan's Law list. Despite a warning from the state's Attorney General, LaCorte hand copied the state's high risk sex offenders and published them online. In 2004, California officially published the Megan's Law database on the internet.[1]

LaCorte became the Western Region Bureau Chief for the Fox News Channel in 1999, the national Director of News Editorial in 2003 and the VP of Fox News Digital in 2006. In 2006, the network sent him to Gaza to press for the release of kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig.[2]

In March 2019, Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker that Fox News reporter Diana Falzone had the story of the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal before the 2016 election, but that LaCorte told her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert [Murdoch] wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go,” and the story was killed. LaCorte denied making the statement to Falzone and said he killed the story because the evidence was not there, saying, "I was the person who made the call. I didn’t run it upstairs to Roger Ailes or others...I didn’t do it to protect Donald Trump," adding "[Falzone] had put up a story that just wasn’t anywhere close to being something I was comfortable publishing” and pointed out numerous ways in which Falzone's article failed to meet journalistic standards of verification.[3] Nik Richie, who claimed to be one of the sources for the Falzone story, called LaCorte's account "complete bullshit," adding “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.”[4]

LaCorte left Fox News at the end of 2016. In 2018, he recruited former NPR editorial director Michael Oreskes and former Fox News executive editor John Moody to launch LaCorte News, "a digital news startup with the stated goal of restoring faith in media."[5]

In November 2019, a New York Times investigation found that LaCorte used "Russian tactics" to push inflammatory content on websites Conservative Edition News and Liberal Edition News which he controlled. The ownership of the sites by LaCorte was not known until the Times investigation, which was jointly conducted with a security firm. The investigation found no ties between LaCorte and Russia, and stated: "Security experts said the adoption of Russian tactics by profit-motivated Americans had made it much harder to track disinformation." LaCorte defended himself to the Times, saying that he ran the politically-charged sites as a way to drive traffic to his centrist site LaCorte News. “I wanted to try to find middle ground,” Mr. LaCorte said.[6]