Florida Reporter Gets Himself Fired, Blames Ron DeSantis

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is waging war against the conduct of journalism, and his reign of terror has now claimed the career of former Axios journalist Ben Montgomery. At least, that’s what a breathless dispatch published Wednesday in Talking Points Memo implicitly alleges.

TPM’s Hunter Walker scored an interview with Montgomery after he was summarily fired by his employer when DeSantis’s “media ‘machine’” went after him and, by Montgomery’s explicit extension, the whole of professional journalism.

“This sort of thing has a chilling effect,” Montgomery — a Pulitzer Prize finalist — told Walker. “Nobody wants to have their life disrupted by this machine.” The aggrieved reporter insisted that what DeSantis and his fellow Republicans call “media accountability” is far “meaner” and “more personal” than that. Montgomery’s plight isn’t just a tragedy for him and his industry but the entire nation, according to Montgomery. “It’s a sad day for democracy,” he mourned, “and a sad day for all of us.”

Even by modern journalistic standards, the self-aggrandizing sophistry displayed in these remarks has few parallels. It was Montgomery’s behavior that cost him his job, and his employer’s reaction to that behavior isn’t even especially remarkable.

You see, Montgomery was one of the many reporters on DeSantis’s email lists. As such, he was one of many recipients of the governor’s regular press releases. One of those press releases discussed a Tallahassee initiative aimed at “exposing the diversity, equity, and inclusion scam in higher education” and promoted DeSantis’s efforts to pare back state funding to institutions that promote DEI. “We will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” the governor said in a statement.

None of this is a secret. The language DeSantis and his team used, while deliberately provocative, isn’t new and should not have been shocking to journalists who have followed the governor’s career, which reporters who cover Tallahassee presumably have. But Montgomery was apparently appalled.

“This is propaganda,” he wrote in reply to the email, “not a press release.” First off, it was, by definition, a press release. To the extent that its substance appealed to propagandistic rhetoric, that’s a subjective assessment. Subjective assessments are the province of opinion writers. Montgomery later defended himself by asking the public to “read the whole thing” because “it was just a series of quotes about how bad DEI was.” That’s correct. And do you know why? Because it was a press release about a politician’s political initiative.

The banality of it all would be enough to put you to sleep had Montgomery not made himself into the center of what would otherwise not have been a story at all.

DeSantis’s team did help to make it into a national story when Alex Lanfranconi, communications director for Florida’s Department of Education, captured a screenshot of Montgomery’s emailed reply, tweeted it out, and said simply that this was the response he had received from Axios’s reporter. That’s it.

The Washington Post alluded to the hostility Lanfranconi has engendered among reporters by “questioning their work,” and insinuating that reporters who question the governor’s initiatives are “endorsing porn in elementary schools.” It’s provocative and antagonistic stuff. Of course, that is the goal. The governor has cultivated an antagonistic relationship with mainstream political media to advance his political prospects within the Republican Party. When media is antagonistic back, his efforts have had their desired effect.

So, given all this rallying around Montgomery, you might wonder why Axios let this reporter go in the first place. According to Montgomery, the termination phone call he received from Jamie Stockwell, executive editor of Axios Local, sounded to him like she was “reading from a script.” Whether Stockwell was a hostage at the time, we may never know. But her rationale for the move, according to Montgomery, was that he had “irreparably tarnished” his reputation “in the Tampa Bay area.” Maybe that’s excessive, but Montgomery may have sacrificed some level of access to DeSantis’s administration and his inner circle, which limits his utility to his employer. Perhaps his role would be better occupied by a reporter more inclined to preserve that access.

Again, the crushing mundanity of all this would be oppressive but for the scene-chewing theatrics of all this story’s players.

What we have here is an account of a journalist who was triggered, overreacted, sacrificed some of his value to his employer, and suffered professional consequences as a result. It’s also a story of a potential presidential aspirant leveraging that event to generate headlines for what would otherwise have been just another press release about a months-old initiative. The effort by Montgomery and his boosters in the press to transform it into a martyrological morality play is a transparent attempt by all involved to secure maximum political advantage from an event that would have passed unnoticed in the absence of these hysterics.

We must assume that the authors of this tale wanted it to be received as a tragedy. It turned out to be a farce.