Information Blockade

Arpaio is "always available to talk, especially with a TV station," says Mario Flores, the station's news director.

Univision recently scaled back coverage of Arpaio's busts of illegal aliens, Flores says.

When the station airs video of illegal aliens getting rounded up as Arpaio boasts of being the "toughest sheriff" in America, he says, viewers call to say they've had enough.

"In their mind," Flores says, "the sheriff's terrorizing them."

To help understand the local media's relationship with Joe Arpaio, New Times requested four months of e-mails between journalists and the sheriff's public relations staff.

In the e-mails, Arpaio spokesman Paul Chagolla makes it plain to reporters how the game works: You're either with us or against us.

Other media haven't suffered the same kind of access problems as New Times, the West Valley View, or some in the Spanish-language media — because they've caved in to the sheriff's attempts to control what they report. A theme of this story is that media outlets that resist pay a price.

When Channel 12 blew off the sheriff's "Inmate Idle" show, Arpaio's public-information staff retaliated by giving an unrelated exclusive story on boat safety the station was researching to a competing channel.

News of this incident comes secondhand, since the station was too afraid of Arpaio to talk to New Times.

Channel 12 was frightened because, if it annoys the sheriff too much, easy press-release stories will stop coming. Important crime news will be released late. Requests for interviews, incident reports, mug shots and jail interviews will be denied or delayed. The competition will get the upper hand.

In other words, broadcast media executives worry that, without the cooperation of Arpaio's office, ratings will suffer.

Information — and the power to withhold it — is the tool Arpaio uses to work over the media. It takes courage for a newsperson to put it on the line and speak honestly about his or her relationship with Arpaio or his flack Chagolla.

Turns out there are few journalists in the business here with that kind of nerve.

Ward Bushee, executive editor of the Arizona Republic, didn't return calls for this article.

Confirmation of the "Inmate Idle" incident between Channel 12 and Arpaio wasn't possible, because the station's news director, Mark Casey, wouldn't return calls.

The reason New Times quoted an anonymous La Voz reporter in this article was that Elvira Espinoza, the paper's editor, wouldn't make herself available, and the reporter was afraid that going on the record would affect his job security.

As for Espinoza, her office's excuse for her ducking out of an interview with New Times was that she had just had dental work and wouldn't be able to speak for two weeks. When New Times asked her secretary whether Espinoza could respond to e-mails, the woman said her editor was under heavy medication and would be out of touch.

Going on the record for this article won't help La Onda's rapport with Arpaio, or with Chagolla.

In fact, once La Onda reporter Antonini had a few days to think about the interview she and station manager Madrid did with New Times, she tried to take everything she had said off the record.

Then she contradicted the central theme of her interview.

"I feel that the information that Joe Arpaio does or does not provide this station does not hinder me as a reporter," she wrote in an e-mail.

The next day, she called on a speakerphone with Madrid and Mayra Nieves, the station's president of programming, and all but begged New Times not to use her comments.

And why did the journalists at La Onda try to take back what Antonini had said? They explained that they were extremely worried about how the sheriff would react.

He might send his deputies to the station or to its employees' homes, Madrid speculated. She laughed as she said this, but she wasn't kidding.

"We don't know what he'll do," Madrid said of the Sheriff.

The Arizona Republic has never been on the sheriff's enemies list.

The sheriff needs the state's biggest newspaper as much as it needs him. But even its reporters have occasionally run afoul of the MCSO. When reporter Ryan Kost asked whether all 20 people rounded up in a raid on street food vendors were illegal immigrants, Paul Chagolla went off on him.

In their e-mail exchange, he asks Kost why he's "set" on the 20 being illegal immigrants, though Kost's question did not imply such a stance. Chagolla tells Kost to find an earlier news brief he sent the Republic, and when Kost can't, the flack lashes out.