The news release despatched Monday afternoon stated DeSantis, a possible 2024 GOP presidential candidate, had hosted a roundtable “exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education.” It additionally called for prohibiting state price range from getting used to beef up DEI efforts.
“We will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” DeSantis stated within the commentary.
Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, spoke back to the e-mail 3 mins after getting it. “This is propaganda, not a press release,” he wrote to the Department of Education press place of work.
About an hour after that, the Education Department’s conversation officer, Alex Lanfranconi, shared Montgomery’s answer on Twitter, the place it has since been viewed greater than 1 million occasions.
Montgomery stated the news release had “no substance,” including that he “read the whole thing and it was just a series of quotes about how bad DEI was.”
Axios editor in leader Sara Kehaulani Goo showed Montgomery is not hired with Axios, however declined to remark additional.
The state legislature’s GOP majority has additionally proposed a raft of rules that will reshape Okay-12 and better schooling within the state and ban gender research, restrict transgender pronouns and erode tenure.
This isn’t the primary time that the communications workforce of DeSantis, who has campaigned on a warfare on “woke,” or his management has revealed exchanges with newshounds or criticized the news media.
Last April, DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw declined an interview request with The Post and advised to her Twitter fans that The Post used to be looking to blackmail her via writing a profile about her. She in the end introduced restricted cooperation with the reporter.
Lanfranconi has posted footage of emails and articles from newshounds in contemporary weeks, wondering their paintings, and wrote that the New Yorker used to be becoming a member of “the list of those endorsing porn in elementary schools” over the mag’s quilt artwork.
The Florida Department of Education spokesperson and the governor’s communications place of work didn’t reply to requests for feedback.
Montgomery, who has labored as a journalist within the Tampa Bay house since 2005, stated he has noticed identical incidents occur to newshounds 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-win votes and disrupt the lives of hard-working journalists,” he stated.
Named a Pulitzer finalist for his reporting that exposed abuse at a Florida reform college for boys, Montgomery used to be employed via Axios in past due 2020 and despatched his first publication in January 2021 as a part of the opening’s rising presence in native journalism. He stated the team of workers used to be steadily confident in his early days on the corporate that “we’re not going to let the trolls run the newsroom,” and that he used to be subsequently “unafraid” to ship the e-mail to the click place of work.
Axios allowed newshounds in 2020 to sign up for racial justice demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd via police, however limited its reporters from protesting for or in opposition to abortion rights two years later.
The response within the newsroom has been a mixture of unhappiness for dropping a colleague and worry that one thing identical may just occur to them, in step with an individual aware of inner conferences who spoke at the situation of anonymity to speak about inner exchanges.
Montgomery stated his former co-workers have expressed “outrage” to him about what took place.
“It might seem like a little thing for a guy in Tampa, Fla., to be out of a job for a minute,” Montgomery stated. “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.”