If Katie Hobbs is thinking about what to do after her time as Governor is up, one option would be to test her skills in the Hide and Seek World Championships. After all, she proved during the 2022 gubernatorial election campaign that it’s what she’s best at.
After dodging any request to debate her opponent Kari Lake during her campaign, Hobbs also ducked reporters who dared to question her about it. She even hid in a restaurant bathroom after another reporter asked her why she didn’t like discussing politics.
All this hiding should have resulted in a simple decision. According to long-standing Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission (AZCCEC) rules, an opponent (in this case Kari Lake) should have been provided with airtime when a candidate (in this case Katie Hobbs) refused to debate. And the AZCCEC planned to do just that. But hours before Kari Lake’s interview was scheduled to take place, the AZCCEC learned that Arizona PBS went behind their back to schedule an exclusive interview with Katie Hobbs—moving them to postpone Lake’s interview.
If you think all this reeks of collusion, you’re right. And now, a public records request has made it clear. Katie Hobbs wasn’t playing hide and seek alone. She was purposefully aided by leadership at Arizona State University (ASU) and at PBS…
The legacy media seem to be on a mission: tear down Arizona’s groundbreaking school choice program with false accusations and inaccurate reporting.
Fortunately, facts don’t lie, even if the media does.
The Arizona Capitol Times declared this week in astonishing terms, “Education department under fire for approving $124M in improper ESA [education savings account] purchases.”
Such astronomical levels of fraud would seem to threaten the very foundations of the historic school choice revolution that has swept the nation. There was just one problem, the headline was completely false.
Not only were the supposed dollar amounts exaggerated up to 100 times greater than the amounts of improper spending actually reported by the department, but these purchases weren’t even approved in the first place.
Here’s the story the media won’t tell: Arizona’s 2022 adoption of a fully universal ESA program has been a nation-leading success, allowing parents across the state to give their children an education best suited to their needs.
To its credit, the Times quickly retracted its original headline and issued a formal correction admitting “an inaccurate dollar amount” in its first draft and eliminating the suggestion that the purchases were “approved.” Unfortunately, such journalistic ethics appear not to be shared by the Times’ more ideological media counterparts in Arizona, particularly those of the teachers’ union-aligned 12News team, who have resolutely declined to correct or retract their false reporting.
12News’ Craig Harris, for instance, has repeatedly and falsely declared that the state has “approved” ESA purchases for iPhones, televisions, and other non-educational items over the past year.
But all those purchases haven’t been approved, as the State Board of Education’s ESA Handbook—ratified by members appointed by both former Gov. Doug Ducey and Gov. Katie Hobbs—makes clear. The document expressly states that while families’ ESA purchases under $2,000 are promptly reimbursed by the state, these items “are not deemed ‘approved’ by the Department, until they are audited OR the timeframe to audit the orders has passed [2 fiscal years].” Just like their tax returns filed with the IRS, these families’ ESA purchases are processed up front and subject to enforcement afterwards.
Yet, 12News either knowingly misrepresented the status of these orders or else incompetently failed to perform basic due diligence to learn how the program operates.
By 12News’ anti-ESA logic, the IRS should apparently also withhold refunds to taxpayers until their tax returns have been audited potentially years later, rather than promptly when the returns are filed.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that 12News’ anti-school choice reporters have been exposed in such light. In 2018, Harris (then with the Arizona Republic) falsely reported that Arizona charter schools produced worse student graduation rates and worse outcomes on the state A-F letter grade system than district schools. Both claims turned out to have been fabricated results stemming from a faulty, agenda-driven data analysis by Harris’ team.
In 2024, 12News’ Joe Dana likewise doubled down on false claims that ESAs cost state taxpayers more than the public school system per student by conveniently ignoring major sources of public school funding. The state’s Classroom Site Fund, for example, allocates over $1,000 for every public school student in the state and gives not a penny to ESA families.
Undeterred by journalistic standards, Dana’s 12News team also went further, deceptively extracting a fragment of a statement given by the state’s budget director (given in response to a completely different question) to suggest the ESA program had created unprecedented strain on the state budget.
The Heritage Foundation’s Matt Ladner and Jason Bedrick have already exposed a litany of deceptive claims flowing from outlets like 12News, while more prestigious national news organizations like The Washington Post have seen their recent anti-ESA narratives similarly debunked. Yet none of these outlets have expressed any contrition for their deceptive coverage.
Indeed, in perhaps the richest of ironies, Harris’ 12News team recently attacked ESAs for “hurting” high-performing schools like Arizona charter network BASIS by competing with it for students. Never mind that Harris previously attacked BASIS for its alleged poor stewardship of taxpayer funds. Now that it is clear he and the media were on the wrong side of that school choice debate as well, they have simply shifted to a new enemy in their war on parents.
Looking at the whole of Arizona’s education landscape, there is no question that those who seek to defraud the state—whether via the traditional public school system or its competitors—should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But if there is a scandal in our education system, it is the dishonest reporting by journalists who are more disturbed by parental empowerment than by the tens of billions of dollars squandered year after year in chronically poor performing public schools.
Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.
Following a post on X mourning the reported buyouts of Arizona Republic writers and reporters, Arizona Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes received a harsh rebuke for her participation in a 2000 stock trading scandal. Mayes acknowledged being a party in a 2003 article after resigning from the newspaper.
In her August 13th post, Mayes wrote, “The buyouts at the Arizona Republic are devastating. Losing legendary reporters like @maryjpitzl means less accountability and less transparency for the public. And it’s bad news for democracy. As a former Republic reporter it breaks my heart to see the state of the paper today.“
Brian Anderson, Founder of the Saguaro Group and Arizona Capitol Oversight, quoted the post from Mayes the following day. His post included a newspaper clipping dating to the 2003 Arizona Republic story that revealed Mayes’ participation in purchasing stock from Central Newspapers Inc. (CNI) shortly before the sale of the Arizona Republic to Gannett Co., Inc.. The stock trade netted the then-beat reporter approximately $5,000, according to Mayes.
Anderson wrote, “When @KrisMayes was a ‘journo’ at @azcentral, she was investigated for insider trading and then suddenly resigned.”
According to a 2022 article in the Republic, when the scandal came to light again in Mayes’ campaign for the AG Office, the Democrat defended the purchase of CNI stock. No charges against Mayes or the other nine members of the Republic newsroom were brought at the time.
However, as the Republic noted, a letter to readers in the newspaper in 2000 from then-Executive Editor Pam Johnson announced the scandal, informing readers that 10 of its “newsroom staff” were flagged by the company after purchasing CNI stock through their 401(k) accounts.
Johnson, who passed away at the age of 74 in 2021, openly chided her staffers, including Mayes, for violating the Republic’s ethics policy. She wrote, “Republic journalists should never attempt to gain from information the general public does not have access to.”
She told readers:
“In this case, we investigated all of those involved and concluded that no one had what securities regulators would consider ‘insider information.’ That is to say, they had no concrete evidence that the company was going to be put up for sale. And therefore, there were no legal implications. They acted on gossip. Still, they heard or saw things that the general public couldn’t.”
“Many of our staff members heard or saw those same things and did not act. As one said: ‘I didn’t know if it was illegal, but I knew it wasn’t right.’ We agree,” she added.
According to AZCentral, the punishments handed down in the incident included suspensions without pay for four supervisors and formal letters placed in the personnel files of six reporters, including Mayes. The Attorney General has maintained that her subsequent resignation was planned in advance so that she could attend law school.
Have you heard the charge that Arizona families are using Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) for babysitting? Or that ESA families are sitting on millions of dollars that they’re using for expensive, overseas vacations? Or that the ESAs only benefit wealthy families who live in high-performing school districts?
These claims range from “lacking key context” to “lacking any evidence whatsoever.” The main source of these and other horror stories that school-choice opponents tell is reliably left-leaning Arizona media outlets such as Channel 12 and the Arizona Republic.
It’s no surprise. Reporters at these outlets, such as Craig Harris, have a history of inaccurate agenda-driven “reporting” on Arizona’s school choice policies. Recent articles and “news” segments from these and other outlets are in keeping with this history.
Award-Winning Errors
In 2018, the Republic released a series criticizing Arizona’s charter schools. The series won the paper a Polk Award. The only problem is that it was riddled with errors.
For example, the Republic claimed that Arizona’s traditional district schools outperformed the state’s charter schools as measured by the state’s A-F school grading system and graduation rates. Both these claims were demonstrably false, but the Republic never ran a correction.
Matthew Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute detailed at length the numerous errors the Republic made to reach those incorrect conclusions, describing the story as “astonishingly deceptive.” For example, they counted one charter school as having a graduation rate of 0% when the school only offered instruction through 9th grade. Two more schools that supposedly had 0% graduation rates had closed years earlier. Another charter school with a low graduation rate was an alternative school that operated under the Yuma County Juvenile Justice Center—hardly an apples-to-apples comparison for typical district schools.
In 2019, the Republic released an above-the-fold, front-page story claiming that 100 of Arizona’s then 544 charter schools were in imminent danger of closure. The report said it was a “near certainty” that at least 50 would close “in the near future.” You’d think such a sensational claim would warrant a healthy dose of skepticism, but the Republic was more than happy to breathlessly repeat the claims nearly unchallenged.
Six years later, 580 charters operate in the state, defying predictions of a mass extinction. In fact, on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s charter school students scored over two grade levels higher than district students on 8th grade mathematics and by almost two grade levels on 8th grade reading. The state’s charter school students also scored higher than any other statewide average on both subjects.
You won’t see those facts reported by Arizona’s legacy media.
Journalism’s Credibility Crisis
For careful journalists concerned with their personal credibility and the declining credibility of their profession with the American public, these embarrassing errors might have sparked some self-reflection upon their sources and practices. For the Republic, it was merely a warmup for more of the same.
Author Amanda Ripley, interviewed for a book she wrote on deep problems of journalism, noted the “strange and insular world of journalism prizes,” which encourage simplistic “us versus them” stories. “This adversarial model that we’ve got going in education, journalism, and politics no longer serves us. There’s a good guy and a bad guy and everything’s super clear, it just breaks down. And we keep awarding prizes in that model. But 99 percent of stories are not that clear-cut,” Ripley noted.
In other words, as if journalism did not have enough problems amid a pronounced decline in public confidence, journalism awards—like the Polk Award given to the Republic team for their inaccurate and ideological anti-charter school series—encourage advocacy-style journalism.
There Is No Evidence Families Used ESAs for Babysitting
Channel 12’s recent anti-choice crusade involves a series of clumsy attacks on Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program.
One myth Channel 12 has been attempting to spread is the notion that participants in the ESA program are using their accounts to pay for “babysitting.” In fairness, this claim is based upon a since-corrected misstatement by a representative of the Arizona Treasurer’s Office. The ESA program, however, has a list of allowable uses for accounts, and babysitting is not now—nor has it ever been—an allowable use.
Despite the correction by the Treasurer’s Office, some in the media are still spreading the claim. Asked about this on KTAR days after the correction, reporter Craig Harris of Channel 12 (who authored or co-authored the erroneous Republic articles described above) artfully claimed that the Arizona Department of Education’s use of risk-based auditing on low-dollar purchases means that we really don’t know whether parents are using ESA accounts for babysitting or not.
We can likewise state that we really don’t know whether any random person has cheated on his or her federal income taxes. After all, the IRS does not audit every single income tax return—instead they use a technique known as “risk-based auditing” to detect and deter fraud. This is the same technique that Arizona law established to ensure accountability in the ESA program, as recommended by the Arizona Auditor General, and it is used by numerous government agencies.
Journalists have no evidence that anyone has ever used the ESA program for babysitting. But if it happened and they were caught, just like the hypothetical tax cheat, the hypothetical ESA offender would face fines or even jail time. The combination of risk-based auditing and consequences for fraud is why the United States has one of the highest tax compliance rates in the world.
ESA Parents Are Not Really “Subsidizing Vacations”
Channel 12 is likewise playing fast-and-loose with the facts when they claim that Arizona parents are “using education tax dollars to subsidize their vacations.” That phrasing gives the impression that ESA funds are being used for flights, food, or hotel stays—none of which are allowable expenses under the ESA statute.
The reality is that families are using ESA funds to buy tickets to museums, zoos, aquariums, and other educational venues that are—appropriately—allowable expenses under the ESA statute, and which public schools regularly purchase as well.
ESAs Expand Educational Opportunity
Stories from the same outlets also claim the ESA is “hurting high-performing public districts.” Even setting aside that such statements treat children as mere funding units for district schools, reporters’ use of the term “high-performing” is out of step with what most parents think it should mean.
The article notes that the “top five school districts losing students who left for [ESAs] are: Mesa, Deer Valley, Chandler, Peoria and Scottsdale,” and that all these districts received an “A” letter grade from the state except for Mesa, which received a “B.”
But are Arizona’s school letter grades a reliable indicator of quality? Absolutely not.
In the 2023-24 academic year, Arizona awarded 677 schools “A” grades, while only four schools “F” grades—yet only a third of Arizona students passed the state math exam.
By contrast, GreatSchools is a much harsher grader than state bureaucrats. In Maricopa County, the state awarded 325 “A” grades and only two “F” grades, while GreatSchools gave 49 “A” ratings and 111 “F” ratings. For obvious reasons, parents trust GreatSchools more than they trust state bureaucrats.
In the five districts that parents are fleeing most for ESAs, the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or higher on the state math test ranges from 30% in Mesa to 58% in Chandler. Fewer than half of students scored proficient in Deer Valley and Peoria as well.
Reporters who are hostile to parental choice in education might call that “high performing,” but most parents don’t.
Arizona families deserve accurate reporting on education policy, not sensationalized narratives built on flimsy foundations. Arizona media’s pattern of misrepresenting school choice programs—from the error-ridden charter school series to unfounded attacks on ESAs—undermines the public’s understanding of legitimate educational options.
While parents increasingly turn to alternatives like ESAs and charter schools that demonstrably outperform traditional districts, journalists have a responsibility to report these developments fairly, not perpetuate myths that serve no one except those invested in maintaining the status quo. Arizona’s children benefit when families have genuine choice in education, and they deserve journalism that illuminates rather than obscures the facts about their options.
Matthew Ladner is a Senior Advisor for education policy implementation and Jason Bedrick is a Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
In a letter to readers on Wednesday, Hank Stephenson, co-founder of the Arizona Agenda, dropped a bombshell that Gannett is reportedly buying out top reporters and columnists at the Arizona Republic.
The move follows Gannett’s decision to shutter its printing facilities in Arizona and the decision at News Media Corp that marked the end of five newspapers in outlying areas of Arizona.
Stephenson, a 15-year veteran journalist covering Arizona politics for the New York Times and Politico, wrote in part:
“The corporate morons at Gannett have offered another round of buyouts to their top talent at the Republic — and we’re losing some of the best reporters and columnists in Arizona.
“Among those that got bought out is “Agendie” winner and Arizona treasureMary Jo Pitzl. Plus, we hear the list includes columnists Laurie Roberts, EJ Montini, Elvia Diaz, Phil Boas, among others.”
👁️👁️👁️👁️The worst of the fake news local MSM in Arizona is finally no more! Granted, I agree that Mary Jo Pitzl wasn't one of the worst, but Laurie Roberts and EJ Montini are two of the absolute worst fake news journos in our state. Arizona Agenda, which is reporting this, is far… https://t.co/509wJrTedypic.twitter.com/ith4n8o4RD
The story was posted to X by journalists Jen Fifield and Rachel Alexander. Fifield commented, “What will the Republic be without the great @maryjpitzl and its columnists. Thinking of all my journalism friends this week at the Republic and elsewhere. And our community.”
Alexander greeted the news with relish, writing, “The worst of the fake news local MSM in Arizona is finally no more! Granted, I agree that Mary Jo Pitzl wasn’t one of the worst, but Laurie Roberts and EJ Montini are two of the absolute worst fake news journos in our state.”
Garret Lewis, Host of The Afternoon Addiction on 550 KFYI, asked X at large, “Do you think USAID paid for any AZ Republic subscriptions?” alluding to reports that the agency paid for exorbitant subscriptions to various outlets, including Politico, as reported by Axios.
Do you think USAID paid for any AZ Republic subscriptions? The free market has spoken. Is it a coincidence that the USAID cash has dried up and now there is no more money for the AZ Republic? Hmmmm. pic.twitter.com/magCNsPsia
Lewis asked further, “Is it a coincidence that the USAID cash has dried up and now there is no more money for the AZ Republic? Hmmmm.”
On July 25th, Gannett Co., Inc., the parent company of the Arizona Republic, revealed that the historic broadsheet newspaper of Arizona would no longer be printed in the state, but rather would be printed at its Las Vegas facility and shipped into Arizona at the cost of 117 jobs and the closure of the paper’s massive Deer Valley Printing Facility in North Phoenix. At the time, Lark-Marie Antón, Gannett chief communications and brand officer, claimed in a statement that “The Arizona Republic will continue to provide readers with quality, local content that matters most to them,” and did not allude to any staffing changes at the newspaper.
