Journalists’ Roundtable: Kari Lake, dual-language instruction, container wall and more

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. To discuss the week’s top stories, we were joined by Jeremy Duda with Axios Phoenix, Stacey Barchenger with The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com and Mark Brodie with KJZZ Radio.

Topics for the show included:

• Kari Lake blames Google for her defeat
• Rolling Stone goes after Lake
• Dual-Language instruction suit
• Horne Claws back from Federal Funds
• Arizona agrees to pay for container wall

Kari Lake Hearing

Stacey Barchenger: “It’s the first meeting, it turns out be a 4-hour hearing and 3 hours of it is all about election manipulation. The Democrat on the committee seemed to think that this is just another way that the Republicans in the legislature keep talking about election losses.”

Mark Brodie: “I think Kari Lake got us to how she lost the election to Google. This was one of her main talking points were that the search results were being manipulated to bring up more bad stories about her and that caused people to think negatively about her. There are legitimate topics to talk about when it comes to big tech and social media. But I am not sure that a lot of folks thought that Kari Lake lost the election to Google would be top of the list.”

Jeremy Duda: We’ve gone over a lot of reasons why Kari Lake lost that race and I think it’s apparent to a lot of folks, not Kari Lake, maybe not folks on the committee but I think we’ve kind of seen the same trends played out in other races in Arizona, nationally. I’ve heard false claims all year, she lost because of rigged elections. I’ve never heard it was because of Google ready search results or something like that. We saw the reasons before our own eyes what really swayed voters, these swing voters these center right voters that normally vote Republican away from Kari Lake.

Stacey Barchenger: We take from this that Kari Lake is still trying to find reasons she lost the election to Governor Hobbs that aren’t just a bad campaign or policies that didn’t resound with, the majority of Arizonans. I think it’s interesting this testimony was that any close race in Arizona was decided by Google.