Taken together, the three audits of El Paso Matters identify legitimate questions about how election reporting is framed, how legal developments are explained, and whether candidates receive comparable scrutiny by El Paso Matters.
El Paso voters depend on local journalism to help them understand candidates, evaluate competing policy proposals and make informed decisions at the ballot box. In a local election, where candidates have limited exposure, news organizations can help shape what voters know about a candidate. This is why accuracy, context and consistency matter.
That was the premise behind this series examining selected examples of El Paso Matters’ 2026 election coverage. The goal was not to assume that the publication was biased or that its reporting was wrong. It was to examine whether its conclusions were supported by the available evidence and whether readers receive the information they need to evaluate the candidates before going to the polls. In other words, are the editorial decisions of El Paso Matters fair to all the candidates seeking office, or are some candidates scrutinized more than others.
The three audits have raised different questions. The first examined how a poll was used to frame the electoral prospects of El Paso’s Republicans. The second article looked at the treatment of City Council candidate Arturo Alluin by El Paso Matters with their report about an arrest and an expunction. This third installment looks at the concerns county commissioner candidate Annette Griego has about El Paso Matters’ profile of her and the differences in how El Paso Matters scrutinizes candidates.
These three audits of El Paso Matters raise legitimate questions about the editorial decisions that they make in deciding how to report on candidates running for office. The issue over their decision-making processes is that they tend to show a disparity on how each candidate is covered suggesting that biases drive their editorial decisions.
Because of the important role that the news media plays in elections, it is important to understand if a news organization meets the standards that voters expect.
Annette Griego Disputes How Her Candidacy Was Reported by El Paso Matters
In its October 9 story, El Paso Matters profiled Republican Leo Arcos and Democrat Annette Griego. Arcos did not respond to the publication’s calls and emails, while Griego participated in an interview and responded to their questionnaire.
El Paso Matters’ article discussed Griego’s professional background, her medical business, her views on county spending and property taxes, and her plans if elected. It also raised the question about whether she would continue operating her medical clinic while serving as the county commissioner.
The article reported that some residents had encouraged her to become a full-time commissioner. Griego said she would continue working at her clinic as much as possible, explaining that her staff and management company handled much of the work. The story quoted her as saying, “I’m still going to come in whenever I can,” and noted that she would need to take the county commissioner position first to understand the time commitment it required.
Griego objected to the article in a written complaint to El Paso Matters. She said the story misrepresented what she told the reporter and created an unfair impression of her commitment to public service. She specifically disputed the characterization that she would serve the county “as needed.”
Griego objected to the scrutiny of her medical practice, arguing that the publication did not apply the same scrutiny to other candidates who owned businesses. Griego pointed to another candidate’s coverage by El Paso Matters that did not scrutinize his work demands. The other candidate is Miguel Teran who is running for the other open county commissioner seat. He owns Roman Construction Project Management. Other than to mention that he owns the project management company, El Paso Matters did not scrutinize whether Teran will step aside from his company to work as a full-time county commissioner, something the publication pointed out in Griego’s case. Griego said that she had cooperated with the publication in good faith and had a recording of her interview that she was prepared to use to establish what she said.
On one hand, El Paso Matters scrutinized Griego’s time commitment to the county seat if she were elected but did not apply the same treatment to another candidate also running for an open commissioner’s seat. Editorially, El Paso Matters made the decision in one case to ask what the candidate was going to do about their business while not applying the same standard to a second candidate.
Editorially, this is important. A candidate’s plans for balancing a private business with public office is a legitimate concern. Voters have an interest in knowing whether candidates understand the demands of the office and how they intend to meet them. But if El Paso Matters is going to scrutinize one candidate over their business, wouldn’t the voters expect the same from the publication when profiling other candidates?
El Paso Matters updated the article after Griego pointed out that they had misrepresented the gender of her children. El Paso Matters’ correction note acknowledged the error in their reporting and wrote that they also noted Griego’s concerns about how they portrayed her work commitments.
The correction of the family details is appropriate. But the updated revision over Griego’s work commitments remains substantially the same and El Paso Matters has failed to explain why it is important to scrutinize Griego’s business commitments and not Teran’s.
Were Candidates Held to Comparable Standards?
Griego’s complaint raises the issue of whether candidates receive comparable scrutiny about their professional obligations and the demands of public office.
The comparison is not between identical articles, and different races can warrant different questions. Nevertheless, the two county commissioner profiles provide us with the basis for asking how the publication approaches how it reports on similar offices.
In its October 8 story, El Paso Matters covered Republican Matt Sistrunk and Democrat Miguel Teran. The article examined their budget proposals and argued that both candidates sometimes struggled to identify services within the county commissioners’ jurisdiction, discussing policies and projects outside of their control.
The article reported that Teran is the owner of Roman Construction Project Management and discussed his background on the El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1 board. It also reported that he missed a scheduled interview and was later unavailable.
Unlike Griego’s profile, the Precinct 2 article did not examine whether Teran intended to continue operating his business if elected or how he would divide his time between his private business and public office.
Four candidates are running for similar offices but of the four candidates, El Paso Matters chose to single out Griego’s work schedule while not asking the same of the other candidates. It’s not known if this was an editorial decision, an oversight or unfairly targeting one candidate over another. What is known is that El Paso Matters chose to report on Griego’s work schedule without scrutinizing the other candidates’ work commitments.
The question then becomes whether El Paso Matters consistently considers important factors for all the candidates or does it apply different standards selectively? In an election, this is an important factor in news coverage because voters should be allowed to compare the candidates under the same standards.
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What Our Audits Found
The Griego dispute is the final review in this series, but it is not the only case we looked at.
The first audit examined an article by Bob Moore that used an ACLU of Texas poll on immigration enforcement to suggest that El Paso Republicans faced “steep challenges” in the November election. The poll measured public attitudes toward immigration enforcement among adults in El Paso County and four Rio Grande Valley counties. It was not a poll about candidate preferences, likely voter behavior or the electoral prospects of either party.
The poll offered information that could reasonably inform political analysis. But a poll measuring attitudes about immigration enforcement does not, by itself, establish how respondents will vote in a particular election. But the issue remains whether the article sufficiently distinguished the survey’s findings from Moore’s interpretation of their electoral implications.
The audit questioned whether readers were given enough context to judge the conclusions presented by Moore in his article.
The second audit examined El Paso Matters’ coverage about City Council District 8 candidate Arturo Alluin. El Paso Matters reported allegations arising from an earlier incident, sought Alluin’s response and asked him to provide an expunction order after he said the case had been expunged.
A court order reviewed for the second audit shows that a court granted Alluin’s request for expunction on April 16, 2026, nearly five months before the September article.
The question about El Paso Matters’ treatment of Alluin is about whether the arrest was an important detail that voters need when there is no public record supporting a conviction of Alluin. Moreover, it wasn’t until almost a year after the accusation was made that Alluin was arrested after he turned himself into the police at their offices. The final fact in the Alluin case is that the alleged victim told police that she did not want to pursue the case any longer.
Is an arrest record that no longer should be available to the public without a conviction important for the voters to know? Is reporting an arrest years after fair to the candidate when there is no conviction on the public record? An expunction order effectively erases the criminal record of an individual. Whether the El Paso Police Department did not receive the expunction order or did not process it properly is immaterial because the fact is that it was an editorial decision that allowed the article to be published. The criminal charge that should no longer be available in the public record is not a conviction, but rather an accusation that did not go to court.
Under these set of facts, did El Paso Matters make the editorial decision to report Alluin’s arrest as a public service, or was the decision based on other factors unrelated to educating the voters about the candidate?
More important, was repeating the arrest in a second article serving the public good, or simply making an editorial decision made with bias?
What Do the Three Audits Establish?
Considered together, the three audits of El Paso Matters’ election coverage raise questions about the different aspects of election journalism and news media fairness:
- Evidence and interpretation: When Bob Moore made the political conclusion from a poll, without properly disclosing what the poll showed against what he inferred is not proper election coverage journalism. Moore’s report inferred conclusions that readers had no way to easily verify for themselves because Moore did not include the underlining information in his story.
- Accuracy and legal context: When reporting allegations involving a candidate, did the story adequately explain the relevant legal status, distinguish allegations from established facts and provide context appropriate to the information’s public-interest value, or did it unfairly insinuate that a candidate is a criminal? El Paso Matters Alluin’s report glosses over an important issue. It is that legally, Alluin does not have a criminal record because a court order erased it. Had the El Paso Police Department done its due diligence or the courts properly delivered the judge’s order to them, Alluin’s case would not have been part of the public record, as is the case with other law enforcement and courts that El Paso Matters consulted. Editorially, the decision El Paso Matters used to publish the article was based on police reports that could not be confirmed by other law enforcement agencies and after El Paso Matters was told that the records they were using were expunged. The editorial decision to publish the police account of criminal charges that were not sustained by other public records demonstrates a bias against the candidate by the editors of El Paso Matters. Bias has no place in fair election coverage.
- Consistency of scrutiny: When candidates have comparable professional or personal backgrounds relevant to public office, does the publication apply comparable questions and editorial standards to each candidate, or only a select few? El Paso Matters chose to scrutinize Griego’s time management while not doing the same for other candidates running for similar offices. This latest example demonstrates that editorial decisions made by El Paso Matters in their election coverage are not applied equally and are likely driven by bias and selective decisions about how to treat candidates running for office.
The unfortunate thing for El Paso voters is had Griego chosen not to respond to El Paso Matters’ questions and interviews, she would likely have been better off over their coverage of her. Several candidates have chosen not to participate in interviews and questions from El Paso Matters leaving them with better coverage from the publication, like Teran.
Can El Paso Matters offer fair election coverage to El Paso voters when many of the candidates seeking office are choosing not to answer their calls for interviews or fill out their candidate questionnaires?
Griego makes this point succinctly in her comments to us for this audit.
In an email, Griego wrote that “it is unfortunate and disappointing that my words were misrepresented in writing and did not accurately reflect what I communicated during the interview.”
She adds “that several people had cautioned me against participating in the interview,” with El Paso Matters, adding that “however, I chose to give them the benefit of the doubt and approached the process in good faith.”
Griego concludes, that “throughout this process, I have remained cooperative, transparent, and responsive because of the respect I have for journalism and the important role it plays in keeping the public informed.”
The other candidates that have refused to participate have received better coverage from El Paso Matters, raising the question that candidates who do not subject themselves to the scrutiny from El Paso Matters are better off in the end?
Is El Paso Matters Serving the Community?
El Paso Matters can perform useful civic functions by reporting on candidates, public policy and local government. But for their coverage to be useful to the voters, it needs to be fair, transparent and the editorial decisions behind their election coverage must be devoid of bias that can lead to the unfair coverage of certain candidates.
In El Paso where local elections can have direct consequences for taxes, public safety, infrastructure and government spending, the election coverage by any news outlet must lead with the question, does this news report serve the voters by fairly representing the candidates to them?
The three audits reveal that El Paso Matters made critical editorial decision mistakes that have not served the voters. This lack of fairness has led to several candidates avoiding El Paso Matters altogether.
Election journalism should do more than tell voters what a reporter thinks a poll means, which allegations deserve attention or which candidate has the stronger position. It should give the public enough reliable information to reach their own conclusions.
In these three examples, El Paso Matters failed.
The audits of El Paso Matters coverage identified specific, unanswered questions about accuracy, context, proportionality and consistency that demand answers because the quality of election coverage affects the public’s ability to make informed choices about who they will vote for.