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In February, the San Antonio Express-News broke a story that quickly became national news: Tony Gonzales, a Republican congressman from Texas, had an affair with Regina Santos-Aviles, an aide who died by suicide after setting herself on fire. The fallout was significant. Gonzales initially denied the relationship. Last month, he admitted to it and dropped his reelection bid.
The story had been months in the making. After Santos-Aviles died, in September, Bayliss Wagner and Nancy M. Preyor Johnson, a pair of Express-News reporters, heard rumors of the affair but could not immediately confirm them. What followed was the patient, persistent work that is the foundation of great local journalism: earning trust in the community, building sources, and pursuing every lead. “It’s frustrating at the beginning, because it was difficult to get information,” Preyor Johson told me when I spoke to the duo this week. “It’s no secret that journalists are not trusted, right? And so you start there. You start not even at zero. You start below that. And you have to build that relationship.”
Their work paid off. Since their initial story, they have produced a series of follow-up scoops, including the first interview with Santos-Aviles’s estranged husband and the disclosure of explicit and uncomfortable text messages between Gonzales and Santos-Aviles. On Monday, Wagner published new reporting: that Gonzales pressured a different staffer for sex and nude photos in 2020, years before his affair with Santos-Aviles. The hundreds of text messages obtained by the Express-News reveal that Gonzales may have a pattern of pursuing sexual relationships with subordinates.
“Gonzales is still in Congress, and this activity happened while he was under our noses. It’s so important that people know what happened with Regina and the kind of behavior that was going on so much earlier,” Wagner said. Preyor Johnson told me that their priority is to keep the focus on the victims. Looking at Gonzales’s social media, “he’s just moving on,” she said. “Granted, we know that there is an end date here for him, but he continues, and Regina wasn’t able to continue that way.”
Last week, more than sixty protesters gathered outside the offices of the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, the most widely circulated newspaper in the region. They held signs and large photos of three recently fired columnists: Jim Shaw, Joan Brickner, and Jack Zaleski.
The crowd braved a cold, snowy day to register their disappointment with the Forum’s recent dismissals, which they believe were politically motivated. Lyn Dockter-Pinnick—one of the organizers of the protest, and a member of a local community group called BadAss Grandmas for Democracy—told me that she was “horrified” when she learned the writers were being let go. “They’re moving more and more toward silencing voices of journalists that do not agree with the administration,” she said, of the Forum’s leadership.
“The recent decision to let go of three of our freelance opinion columnists was strictly a business decision based on data and feedback from our readers,” Bill Marcil Jr., the CEO of Forum Communications, said in a statement when I reached out for comment. He added that he plans to write a column on the topic next week. The problem doesn’t really appear to have been about money, however: Earlier this year, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Forum Communications bought seven newspapers, putting the number of media outlets under its ownership above thirty-five. Brickner, who was the Forum’s only regular Black columnist, was being paid just seventy-five dollars a week.
“When you are aware of who owns the newspaper, it’s not exactly a surprise, because they are very conservative,” Brickner said. “But I thought that they would be more evenhanded than that.” Zaleski, who was the Forum’s editorial-page editor for more than thirty years, is also skeptical: “They say it was a business decision to bring some more balance to the pages, which is peculiar in my estimation, because the balance was there before this happened.”
Shaw wrote for the Forum for twelve years and was voted Best Newspaper Columnist in the area eight times. He was shocked when he got the news. “I just couldn’t believe it. There’d been no indication from anybody that they didn’t like what I was doing,” he told me. “I know that Bill Marcil Jr. has been telling people that one of the reasons I got fired was because I write too much about Trump.” The columnists were not given an official reason for their dismissals. However, they share one thing in common: each had, at times, been sharply critical of Trump and his policies. They said that after Trump was reelected, they received an email telling them to avoid writing about national subjects without a local focus. “The message was unmistakable, especially with the timing of it,” Shaw told me.
The decision to let the writers go has sparked backlash on social media, and the Forum has received letters critical of the move. Some readers have canceled their subscriptions. Dockter-Pinnick said she ended hers after twenty years; another woman at the protest had canceled hers after sixty-two. “It’s so sad,” Dockter-Pinnick said. “It means that fundamentally what’s happened is the community has lost faith in that organization to represent a free and independent press.”
There is some good news: all three of the columnists plan to keep writing and have fielded offers from other local outlets. Shaw published his first column for KFGO, his new home, yesterday. The headline: “I’m Back and I Have a Lot to Talk About.”
Rosa María Carranza has spent decades working in child development, most recently caring for toddlers at an outdoor Spanish-immersion preschool she cofounded. In 1991, Carranza fled El Salvador during the country’s civil war. Now sixty-seven, she lives in Oakland, under temporary protected status, which allows people from countries deemed unsafe to live and work in the United States. Over the years, she has paid taxes and contributed tens of thousands of dollars into Medicare and Social Security. But a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will soon make her, along with an estimated hundred thousand other lawful immigrants, ineligible for Medicare.
In a piece published by El Tímpano in collaboration with KFF Health News, Vanessa G. Sánchez, a senior health equity reporter, profiles Carranza to illustrate the human cost of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. El Tímpano is a civic media organization serving and covering the Latino and Mayan immigrant communities in the Bay Area. “It’s like getting slapped on the face after more than 30 years working for the system here,” Carranza told Sánchez. “And in return, this is what we have now.”
Carranza will be stripped of her health insurance coverage by January 4, 2027. She also fears losing her legal residency, which could mean detention or deportation, since the Trump administration tried to end temporary protected status for Salvadorans during his first term. The stress and uncertainty have left her with insomnia and anxiety. “This is like a horror movie, a complete nightmare,” Carranza said. “This is not how I imagined getting old.”
Hat tip to Riddhi Setty for the Forum story. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.
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