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.
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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.
Not surprisingly, coverage of politics draws the most criticism, maybe more so because this is a major-election year. These days, readers are attuned to every perceived slight. Sometimes they are off base, but more often than not, I share their ire, or at least their puzzlement.
(Some of that anger is trained on our wire stories, which our journalists don’t report and write. Or, as I’ve mentioned before, some readers confuse our news and opinion pages. We will deal with those topics in future columns.)
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. No doubt conservatives — including some politicians and activists — are at times to blame, as they don’t want to be quoted in The News. They see cooperation with us as a stain on their street cred.
Conservatives who don’t want to talk to us often turn to social media and right-leaning media personalities and outlets instead. They don’t ignore only our journalists; they ignore all mainstream reporters.
They may not need us, but we need them. Maybe that’s why, in conversations over the past couple of weeks, I sensed a sobriety about this issue on the part of reporters and editors. They know this is not our sources’ problem. It is ours.
And it is a self-reinforcing problem. 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.
Executive Editor Katrice Hardy agrees that her staff is inconsistent about objectivity and fairness.
“We have some room to grow there,” she says. “Often our work can come across as lacking objectivity because we haven’t gotten the other side, but even if we haven’t, we often don’t say how we tried to reach the person. Sometimes when you’re not transparent about those efforts, it can appear as if you’ve never tried.”
She notes that sometimes the problem is that “we write a story and there’s not a lot of time and thought around, ‘Let’s really read this story as someone who’s reading it coldly.’ ... Sometimes I think it’s very easy when you feel like you’re an expert on a topic to lose the objectivity of someone who’s never read it before.”
The work of Gromer Jeffers Jr., The News’ veteran political writer, attracts intense scrutiny. Jeffers, who is also a regular on NBC5′s Lone Star Politics, says he tries “to write the truth, write things as they are.” He seeks to “be fair to both sides in terms of giving them the opportunity to have their say.”
That said, he added later in our conversation, “It doesn’t mean we can’t be better. We have to make a better effort to get out there and talk to conservatives and people who lean right.”
Our Education Lab team, overseen by editor Eva-Marie Ayala, covers a host of hot-button political issues, from school choice (education savings accounts) to culture-war controversies. Readers complain that sometimes conservative voices do not show up in those stories. I would agree.
Her reporters do work hard to include a range of views, Ayala says. But, echoing her colleagues, she adds that some sources, especially right-leaning ones, do not respond to us.
Hardy has told the newsroom that reporters need to be more transparent with readers when they can’t reach someone. Stories now regularly tell us how hard reporters tried to contact a source. One recent investigative piece, for example, said our journalists had sought to reach someone “for months,” without success. That’s a good start.
But it is only a start. In today’s culture of mistrust, we cannot afford to just say, “We tried.” Our readers are smart and thoughtful, and wherever they are on the political spectrum, they deserve a journalism that’s sophisticated and fair-minded. That is the challenge. And the promise.
We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com