Reporter fired; he replied to state email on DeSantis event and called it ‘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 Republican 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 at the St. Petersburg Times in 2010, 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.
The Florida Department of Education spokesman and the governor’s communications office did not respond to requests for comments.
Montgomery, who has worked as a journalist in the Tampa area since
2005, said he has seen similar incidents happen to reporters in Florida.
“It’s incredibly important that their organizations stand up on their behalf and realize that this is nothing but a political tactic to gain right-wing votes and disrupt the lives of hard-working journalists,” he said.
Montgomery was hired by Axios in late 2020 and sent his first newsletter in January 2021 as part of the outlet’s growing presence in local journalism. He said the staff was often assured in his early days at the company that “we’re not going to let the trolls run the newsroom,” and that he was therefore “unafraid” to send the email to the press office.
Axios allowed reporters in 2020 to join racial justice demonstrations after the police killing of George Floyd, but restricted its journalists from protesting for or against abortion rights two years later.
Montgomery said his former co-workers have expressed “outrage” to him about what happened.
“It might seem like a little thing for a guy in Tampa, to be out of a job for a minute,” Montgomery said. “But this has ripple effects for an administration that’s really had their way with the press and run roughshod over a lot of people — good people.”