Fla. reporter fired for email response

Called news release about a DeSantis event ‘propaganda’

An Axios reporter in Tampa said he was fired this week after he responded to a Florida Department of Education email about an event featuring Gov. Ron DeSantis, calling the news release “propaganda.”

Ben Montgomery said he received a call on Monday evening from Jamie Stockwell, executive editor of Axios Local, who asked Montgomery to confirm he sent the email before saying the reporter’s “reputation in the Tampa Bay area” had been “irreparably tarnished.”

The news release sent Monday afternoon said DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate, had hosted a roundtable “exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education.” It also called for prohibiting state funds from being used to support DEI efforts.

“We will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” DeSantis said in the statement.

Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, replied to the email three minutes after getting it. “This is propaganda, not a press release,” he wrote to the Department of Education press office.

About an hour after that, the Education Department’s communication officer, Alex Lanfranconi, shared Montgomery’s reply on Twitter, where it has since been viewed more than 1 million times.

Montgomery said the news release had “no substance,” adding that he “read the whole thing and it was just a series of quotes about how bad DEI was.”

Axios editor in chief Sara Kehaulani Goo confirmed Montgomery is no longer employed by Axios, but declined to comment further.

The state legislature’s GOP majority has also proposed a raft of laws that would reshape K-12 and higher education in the state and ban gender studies, limit transgender pronouns and erode tenure.

This is not the first time DeSantis’ administration has published exchanges with reporters or criticized the news media.

Lanfranconi has posted photos of emails and articles from reporters in recent weeks, questioning their work, and wrote that the New Yorker was joining “the list of those endorsing porn in elementary schools” over the magazine’s cover art.

The Florida Department of Education spokesperson and the governor’s communications office did not respond to requests for comments.