Why is the Dallas Morning News public editor?
Throwing your reporters under the bus is not gonna save your newsroom.
Like most things about American journalism, the newspaper ombudsman is an ad hoc creation with an idealistic but checkered history. The idea of an ombudsman — an independent voice that helps reporters and editors remain accountable and responsive to readership — has promise but isn’t always executed with the best of intentions or with the best results.
Historians of American journalism generally agree that the job came into being in the late 1960s, after New York Times editorial assistant A. H. Raskin excoriated the press in a lengthy essay for the Times Magazine. Among other critiques, Raskin argued that:
The real long-range menace to America’s daily newspapers, in my judgment, lies in the unshatterable smugness of their publishers and editors, myself included. Of all the institutions in our inordinately complacent society, none is so addicted as the press to self-righteousness, self-satisfaction and self-congratulation.
To undo the damage caused by journalistic arrogance and bridge the “credibility gap” that existed between newspapers and their readers, Raskin suggested a “Department of Internal Criticism,” an ombudsman with managerial teeth and the authority to make changes to a newspaper’s operations in response to reader concerns.
It’s interesting to read Raskin’s essay today, in 2024, and see how far the role of ombudsman — or public editor, as it’s commonly called now — has drifted from his original idea. To the extent that public editors even exist (and for the most part they do not), they often feel more like extensions of a newspaper’s public relations team than watchdogs genuinely committed to improving an organization’s journalism. Raskin’s own employer didn’t hire a public editor until 2003 and only then in response to a high-profile scandal — the discovery that Times reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized dozens of articles. Which isn’t to say hiring a public editor wasn’t necessary, just that it was as much an exercise in institutional ass-covering by the Times as it was a demonstration of journalistic integrity or a commitment to self-scrutiny. This tension seems to be an inescapable feature of the role, and scholars have for decades debated the extent to which the “ombudsman’s uneasy chair,” as the Columbia Journalism Review once put it, is a genuine tool for holding journalists accountable for their mistakes or just a shield owners and publishers can use to deflect responsibility and blunt criticism.
That’s all a long preamble to talk about this:
Earlier this year, the Dallas Morning News got a bit of attention (not to mention praise) in the media criticism space when it announced the hiring of Stephen Buckley, a Duke University journalism professor with many years of newsroom experience, as the paper’s new public editor. Publisher and CEO Grant Moise publicized the move in a column, offering vague but mostly unobjectionable justifications: Public trust in media is low, newsrooms aren’t transparent about their decision-making, readers don’t understand how journalists actually do their jobs, etc. etc. If you’ve spent any time around journalism circles in the past decade or so, it’s all stuff you’ve heard before.
Buckley’s job, in his own words, is to function as “a bridge between our newsroom and our readers, forging a line of communication that will deepen your understanding of The News’ processes and priorities while also holding our journalists to the organization’s own rigorous standards.” He reports directly to Moise, not to any of the paper’s editorial staff, ostensibly giving him the independence and autonomy necessary to conduct internal investigations. It’s the kind of role that Raskin surely would’ve appreciated.
This all sounds great. But there’s a problem: Buckley may be independent from the Dallas Morning News’s reporters and editors, but he is still beholden to the interests of the institution as a whole. And the newspaper is still a business. The prerogatives of running a profitable company in our meat-grinder of a capitalist system will inevitably outweigh the demands of doing good journalism.
Last week, Dallas Morning News readers and journalists alike got their first look at what this all means in practice. And the results were dispiriting.
In Buckley’s first actual column as public editor, published on June 13, he calmly but unequivocally scolded the newspaper’s reporters for not working hard enough to include “conservative voices” in their stories, an oversight that, according to him, taints the quality and sophistication of their journalism:
The Dallas Morning News’ masthead says that we “Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question.” It is a challenge to our newsroom and a promise to our readers.
To hear it from some members of our audience, we are falling short of that pledge. They see a lack of fairness in the stories we publish (or don’t), our sources (or lack thereof), our photos, and in the language in those stories. They allege bias in stories about protests over the Israel-Hamas war, education savings accounts, transgender issues, abortion, national politics, state politics and, of course, Donald Trump. And that is a partial list.
Here is my take: Having read The News cover-to-cover every day for the past few months, I know that our reporters do get all sides of the story. They just don’t do it consistently, which isn’t good enough.
He continued:
I do not think our reporters are consciously unfair. I do think that sometimes, when we interview sources with whom we might be sympathetic, we are not as quick to dig for other, opposing voices. We are selective about weaving in voices from all sides.
In particular, conservative voices are frequently missing.
Let’s put aside, for a moment, whether Buckley’s criticisms are valid and whether the Dallas Morning News actually lacks conservative perspectives. (Spoiler: They are not and it does not.) To what journalistic standard is he appealing? What professional norms and ideals is he attempting to impose on the newsroom?
The quote that Buckley uses to open his column is revealing. The words, attributed to former Dallas Morning News publisher George Bannerman Dealey, are pasted to the top of the newspaper’s print Opinion section, and they represent one vision of what journalistic fairness looks like: A shallow appeal to a dated understanding of objectivity that requires reporters to present “both” sides of a story. By implication, what’s missing from the newspaper is the “conservative side” of many stories — as though news inevitably and naturally requires both progressive and conservative voices to be complete and accurate.
This is, frankly, bullshit.
I think it’s funny that Buckley either doesn’t know or didn’t bother to include the full context of Dealey’s original quote, which is carved on the front of his newspaper’s former building. The entire quote isn’t included on the masthead but I don’t really accept that as an excuse because it took me thirty seconds of searching to track down:
Build The News upon the rock of truth and righteousness. Conduct it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity. Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question.
Sure it’s pompous and self-aggrandizing and maybe even a little cringe. But you know what? It actually mentions an important journalistic value, one which Buckley’s column does not bother to discuss: That is, truth. The question he leaves unasked is whether the presence or absence of “conservative voices” in the pages of the Dallas Morning News has anything to do with whether the stories they are printing are accurate, whether they actually inform their readers about the world and accomplish the enormously difficult work of honestly representing reality. Buckley is concerned, not with truth, but with whether the paper’s conservative readers see themselves represented in its pages, whether they can have their views validated and their opinions legitimized:
When conservative readers don’t see their points of view in our pages, their mistrust of The News deepens, and they are even more reluctant to talk when our reporters call. So then their perspective goes missing again, and the bitter cycle of mistrust whirls on. You get the picture.
This is what I mean when I say his position is inextricable from the business operations of the Dallas Morning News. The actual function of this particular column is not to improve the newspaper’s journalism; it’s an exercise in marketing and public relations. More precisely, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the vast audience of right-wing media consumers living in North Texas who, like everyone else in the age of the internet and splintered partisan media, are more likely to give their money and attention to outlets they already agree with. And this white flag did not go unnoticed: The conservative Larrys, Toms and Steves of the area wrote letters to the editor praising Buckley’s column and stating their hope that their “beliefs and concerns when it comes to politics will now be balanced when addressed by your paper” and that “it’s good to see your remorse.”
What’s sad and pathetic is that these sentiments are representative of the most reachable and most sympathetic conservative readers. The “politicians and activists” that Buckley feels are not represented in Dallas Morning News stories will not be appeased by his column. Too-online far-right trolls have already claimed victory and turned the article into an ideological weapon, a tool for further de-legitimizing any actual journalism the paper’s reporters manage to produce. Trying to win these people over is a supremely pointless endeavor, and publicly fucking over your own reporters and handing ammunition to antagonistic sources who already, as Buckley admits, routinely refuse to speak with journalists who don’t uncritically amplify their positions is not going to save the newsroom.
By the way, none of this should even matter. As a regular reader of the Dallas Morning News, I find Buckley’s premise that conservative perspectives aren’t represented laughable, and it’s notable that he didn’t cite a single — not one — specific example of a story that he felt was insufficiently attentive to right-wing perspectives. Republicans wield enormous power in North Texas and dominate state politics; it is quite literally impossible for local reporters to do their jobs without quoting them. Conservatism is the political air we all breathe.
On a recent podcast appearance, Moise, the Dallas Morning News’s publisher, had this to say about his decision to hire Buckley for the public editor role:
I felt that it was far more important for us to have [someone with] an amazing pedigree of journalism than it was to have knowledge of the local neighborhoods of North Texas.
I dunno I’m just speculating wildly here, but maybe it turns out that a little bit of knowledge about who and what your newspaper covers is an important prerequisite for the job.
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A dispatch from Lost in Panther City’s squirrel bureau:
Today’s squirrel was once again photographed by our dedicated reader in Euless.
Did you know that you too could have one of your local squirrels featured in this newsletter? Please send me any and all photos because I want other parts of North Texas besides Euless to be represented. Step up, please.