Since yesterday afternoon, local reporters have been allowed inside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum to do their job covering the audit conducted by Senate Republicans and their team of utterly biased, conspiracy theory propagating auditors, who have sought to cancel the 2020 election because they disagreed with the result.
Jen Fifield, the Arizona Republic reporter who was there as an official audit observer on the very first day and reported clear violations of state law, was the first local reporter to work a shift in the new press pool covering the audit on Tuesday afternoon.
The existence of a press pool is due to the efforts of a coalition of organizations and media interests over the past week, after it became crystal clear that Republicans and the listeners planned to ban journalists from doing their job – and to make sure the listeners are held accountable. Arizona Mirror joined the Arizona Republic and the Arizona Broadcasters Association to fight for media access to the audit site.
Over the past week, our lawyers at Ballard Spahr, led by local media law icon David Bodney, have reached an agreement with the Senate and the auditors that allows journalists, photographers and broadcasters to enter the building. during the counting of the ballots. The result is significant: Arizona news agencies will now be able to keep their readers and viewers informed of what is happening on the ground of the former basketball arena. An informed public is one that can hold the powerful to account.
That listeners were so keen to keep their work out of public view is chilling. In addition to blocking media access to the audit site for a week, they only withheld 1 press point of 15 minutes, not the promised daily Q&A session. (But Ken Bennett, the Senate’s auditor liaison, found time to go to a closed social media platform. conduct a Q&A with pro-Trump and QAnon people.) Similarly, the auditors fought to keep the public and media out of court hearings in the lawsuit the Democrats filed to stop the audit, and they continue to insist that the policies and procedures guiding their work – policies and procedures which, above all, seemed to change daily – must be kept secret.
The work that the Mirror and other media entities have done and continue to do to ensure access to important government work continues. Lawyers aren’t cheap, but the stakes are too high and the consequences of choosing to complain only on the fringes of being excluded required that we put our money where our mouth is and fight for what is just.
