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.”
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“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
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