Emily Wagster Pettus reported on the Mississippi Legislature for 31 years, attending hundreds of committee meetings and floor debates, covering thousands of bills and interviewing countless lawmakers. The Mississippi Senate honored her with a resolution on the Senate floor on March 6.
Pettus started covering the Legislature in 1994 with The Clarion-Ledger before transitioning to reporting for the Associated Press in 2001. Her tenure included the leadership of five governors, six lieutenant governors, four speakers of the House, hundreds of representatives and senators, and countless mayors, aldermen, county supervisors, police chiefs, sheriffs and judges.
The journalist left AP in January after almost two and a half decades of being its Mississippi statehouse and political reporter. So did Rogelio V. Solis, the former photojournalist for the AP’s Mississippi bureau. The AP announced that it was cutting 8% of its total workforce in November after news chains Gannett and McClatchy, which together own hundreds of newspapers nationwide, stopped buying news from AP.
Pettus thanked the Senate for honoring her work, saying “it was an honor and a privilege” to cover 31 Legislative sessions and “be the eyes and ears of the public.”
“I tried to remember as I came up into this beautiful, beautiful building every day that even as politics can seem like a game a lot of the times, it’s important as journalists not to get stuck in the rut of covering it like a game because the decisions made in this building are important and affect the lives of people who never set foot in here,” she said on the Senate floor on March 6.
Mississippi Sen. Hob Bryan, a Democrat from Amory, praised Pettus’ nonpartisan coverage of Mississippi politics and events when he introduced S.C.R. 505 on the Senate floor on March 6.
“It’s truly a remarkable career. If you were to look at a dictionary and look at the definition of a reporter, you could find a picture of Emily Wagster. Her reporting has always been fair and accurate, and I don’t think anyone reading her reports had any idea of what political views she held, if any,” he said on March 6.
Sen. Hillman Frazier, a Jackson Democrat who has been a member of the Legislature for 45 years, said he and Pettus “became close” when he was part of a commission that surveyed Mississippians about the 1890 Mississippi flag that featured the Confederate emblem.Â
“If we, by chance, carve you on Mount Rushmore, you’ll be the first (journalist). That’s because of the work you’ve done, the service you’ve provided to the State of Mississippi and also, making us a better people,” he said on the Senate floor on March 6.
In her speech on the Senate floor, Pettus brought attention to a lack of transparency at the Legislature, such as closed-door caucus meetings that the press and public are not allowed to attend. A Hinds County judge recently affirmed the secretive meetings, ruling against a challenge by the Mississippi Free Press as he determined that the Legislature is not a “public body” under the State’s Open Meetings Act.Â
On March 6, Pettus advocated for transparency and “openness” in the Capitol.
“I do wish that there was a greater commitment to openness for caucus meetings throughout this building,” she told the senators who gathered to honor her.
The resolution noted that the journalist covered many major events during her time as with the Associated Press, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005; the 2005 trial of Edgar Ray Killen, who was convicted for the 1964 murders of Civil Rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Miss.; and the 2007 federal trial of Ku Klux Klan member James Ford Seale, whom a jury convicted of the kidnapping and death of two young Black men, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, in Meadville, Miss.
“We really appreciate you, and we’re going to sorely miss you—everybody that you informed, all of us,” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, told Pettus on the Senate floor on March 6.