Arizona’s legacy media is at it once again—going after our state’s highly popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, which now sits at over 100,000 enrollments.
Last month, activist reporter Craig Harris, from 12 News, pushed his latest “investigation” claiming that the ESA program had fraud totaling 20 percent. Certainly, if such a level of fraud is accurate, it deserves a full investigation. But it didn’t take long before the truth—and the real data—revealed itself.
According to the Arizona Department of Education (ADE), Harris’s 20 percent fraud claim originated from a risk-based audit, which was not only limited in scope, but also targeted higher-risk participants and accounts. But it did not account for the entire ESA program. Instead, the ADE referred to a study by a Stanford PhD that showed a more accurate assessment of fraud at 0.3 percent. That’s quite a gap between the 12 News report and reality. Perhaps Harris is getting math lessons from his buddies in the teachers’ unions who, as we know, have never exactly been good at counting.
As Harris continued to push his vendetta against school choice on social media this past weekend, he was completely ratioed for his debunked ESA fraud claims. And the best part? He was also unmasked as a partisan liberal with Red for Ed conflicts of interest and a history of publishing defamatory stories that are still being litigated.
That’s right. It turns out that Harris’s wife is an activist aligned with the Red for Ed teachers’ union, who promotes their propaganda on her Facebook page. Is it possible that such a conflict of interest could have had an impact on Craig Harris’s—dare we say—fraudulent reporting?
Of course, this isn’t the first time Harris has published defamatory stories with questionable evidence. In 2018, the activist reporter was caught making up a quote from then-Governor Doug Ducey in an attack on charter schools. And his malicious reporting is also at the center of a lawsuit in Texas against Gannett Publishing Services (which owns the Arizona Republic). Then, there was last year when he wrote a misleading story that left out important facts, claiming that Primavera, an online charter school, failed to meet the minimum academic requirements for a traditional charter school.
It’s amazing that 12 News continues to employ someone with such low journalistic standards, but that’s the legacy media for you. They are fully committed to their leftist agenda, especially when it comes to the teachers’ unions. But thankfully, we have alternate media today, in particular Twitter/X and AZ Free News, which makes it possible to rebuke such activist reporters.
Ten years ago, if a reporter like Craig Harris wanted to do a hit job on a conservative politician or a program that the left hates (like ESAs and school choice), he would have pumped out story after story, and the targets of the hit would have been largely helpless in fighting back. That’s because the legacy media, especially at the local level, controlled the flow of information. And there was not much we could do about it.
But that’s no longer the case.
Twitter provides the channel for immediate and real-time pushbacks on these hit pieces. And alternative news outlets, like AZ Free News, provide journalism with real facts and the truth to debunk their claims. In fact, AZ Free News was probably the number one source used to push back against Harris. (See here, here, here, and here—for a small sampling.)
The result of all this is a level playing field, and it drives the legacy media nuts. Craig Harris was so unnerved by the pushback he received on social media that he started blocking all his critics. And then, he tried to defend his blocking by claiming that people were posting pictures of his family. But it turns out that his attempt to play a doxxing victim was just another false claim. There were no images of his family posted, only public images from social media pages that showed his family is a huge supporter of the Red for Ed teachers’ union. Although one image did include a picture of his dog—perhaps that is the family member he is claiming was “doxxed.”
The truth is that Craig Harris wasn’t upset about any alleged doxxing. He was upset that he was caught for his shoddy reporting and not disclosing his conflict of interest. And let’s not forget the irony: Harris sent his own children to private schools while disparaging programs that allow other families to do the same. His reporting isn’t just misleading. It’s a textbook example of agenda-driven journalism.
The lesson here is clear. Legacy media can no longer operate unchecked. Thanks to alternative outlets like AZ Free News, activists, parents, and taxpayers now have the power to challenge false narratives and hold reporters accountable. The ESA program deserves such defenders. Craig Harris may have tried to shape the narrative, but the truth has a louder megaphone. And Arizona families aren’t buying his false headlines.
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