Red Dawn In Dallas--

[MavKikiNYC]

Odd--no mention of Jodie Valade.

I had long perceived a decline in the quality of the DMN. This (somewhat lengthy) piece gives an interesting summary of what has been going on over the last 15 years.

Red Dawn in Dallas
The Morning News has a publisher who wants a ‘revolution.’ Tough investigative reporting is one of his calls to arms. Will a wary newsroom rise up?
BY CRAIG FLOURNOY

On the morning of January 22, more than 800 employees of The Dallas Morning News filed into a hotel ballroom to hear the publisher deliver his annual state-of-the-newspaper talk. Jim Moroney strode to the podium, a gangly forty-seven-year-old knot of energy in a powder-blue shirt and a red-patterned tie. In years past his presentation had been brief, his goals modest. Not this time.

The Morning News, he declared, was like an outwardly healthy person with serious physical problems. “The patient may appear healthy but, frankly, he’s slowly dying.” Over the past three years profitability had dropped 35 percent, he said. Home delivery had declined 10 percent since 2000.

Moroney, who had been publisher of the Belo Corp. newspaper for less than three years, compared the paper to the American colonies and to France in the eighteenth century and Russia in the early twentieth century. In each case, he said, arrogant heads of state ignored the needs of those they governed while radicals pushed ideas that did a better job of satisfying public needs. He praised Lenin and Trotsky, who, he said, “created more good for more of the people.” Those societies needed radical changes and so, now, does the Morning News, Moroney said: “We need a revolution of our culture.”

To accomplish this, the publisher insisted, the newspaper needed to shake off ennui. Managers should stop stifling the staff’s criticism. Editors should praise — not punish — dissenters. “Be thankful for the people who speak up,” he said. “They are our best hope for getting it right.”

Moroney’s “Fidel” speech lasted an hour and twenty minutes. He was preaching the causal relationship between high-quality journalism and financial health. In the final minute he used the word “revolution” seven times, and the crowd in the ballroom gave him a standing ovation. Many were stunned by what they’d heard, particularly Moroney’s praise for newsroom hell-raisers. “I thought he was talking right at me,” says Pam Maples, a fourteen-year veteran of the newspaper and a Pulitzer Prize winner. “When he was saying things like that, I felt like I finally fit in.”

Moroney has definite ideas for the paper’s transformation. For one thing, he sees investigative reporting as central to revitalizing the Morning News. “Enterprise reporting is essential to a great newspaper,” he told CJR. “The highest calling of this profession is well-done investigative journalism.”

In the last decade, Brooks Egerton has been the most prolific investigative reporter at the Morning News, and he has mixed feelings about Moroney’s promise of change. The message excites him, but he wonders if the paper’s culture is too entrenched. “In recent years, the Morning News has tended to hire people — both as editors and reporters — whose orientation is not to rock the boat,” says Egerton. “They have bred these rabbits to be docile.”

Whether the rabbits or the revolutionaries win is an open question.

David Hanners can still recall his sense of excitement when he landed a job with the Morning News in 1982. The paper then was hiring a lot of young, hungry types like him and unleashing them.

For decades, the Morning News had displayed little appetite for enterprise journalism. But at the time Hanners was hired, it was battling the Dallas Times Herald, owned by the deep-pocketed Times Mirror Company, for journalistic supremacy. One would win, the other would fold.

What occurred in that period is an object lesson, demonstrating that great journalism is mostly a matter of will. Before 1986, The Dallas Morning News had never won a Pulitzer. Between 1986 and 1994, it won six. A series documenting pervasive racial discrimination in public housing prompted significant reforms and was awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. A series demonstrating that Texas prosecutors routinely excluded blacks from juries was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling prohibiting that practice, and earned a grand prize from the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Five reporters who produced a special section about the homeless in Dallas were awarded The Newspaper Guild’s 1986 Heywood Broun award. All this in a single year.

More awards rolled in. So did real-world results. The Morning News convinced the federal government to shut down taxpayer-funded slums and kill plans to build new ones. It took on institutionalized violence against women from Thailand to Texas. “The paper had an appetite for red meat journalism,” says Dan Malone, who teamed with his fellow reporter Lorraine Adams to produce a series of stories exposing police misconduct that won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 1992.

But by then the atmosphere was already beginning to change. This became clear when a sheriff sued the Morning News for libel over stories exposing drug dealing in South Texas. That led to an internal showdown at the paper. At a November 1991 meeting, the newspaper’s management demanded that their attorneys be allowed to reveal confidential sources if those sources, in pretrial depositions, denied having provided information. The reporters — Gayle Reaves, David McLemore, and Hanners — refused. They said this would not only betray promises of confidentiality but could endanger lives.

Jim Sheehan, then the president of Belo, did not buy that argument. According to Hanners, “Sheehan told us, ‘This company can protect sources or it can protect shareholders. Given that choice, you can rest assured this company will always fall on the side of the shareholder.’” Sheehan, who retired in 1993, did not return several phone calls.

The reporters did not see their argument as mere theory; months later, one of the men who had been subpoenaed as a possible source was shot and seriously wounded outside his home. In the end the suit was settled out of court and the sources were not outed, but the reporters never forgot that meeting. “Our bosses sat there like bumps on a log,” says Reaves, who won one Pulitzer and was a finalist for another. “It was hard to have respect.”

Bob Mong, the paper’s managing editor at the time of the dispute, now its editor, acknowledges that he and other editors did not defend the reporters during the meeting with Sheehan, but he says they did so in other ways. “Could we have handled that situation better? Yes,” he says. “Did we handle the situation behind the scenes? Yes — and very well.” But Hanners, who won a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting in 1989, feels that the episode “marked the end of aggressive investigative reporting at the Morning News. After that, they lost their stomach for the fight.”

The landscape also seemed to shift a month after the meeting with Sheehan, when the Dallas Times Herald folded, leaving the Morning News with a monopoly. It was after that, some staff members say, that the paper’s culture turned against its hell-raisers. “Your career didn’t always go where it should if you were too vocal,” says Maples, projects editor since 2000. “The culture and the coverage go hand in hand. If you breed a culture like that, then your coverage gets softer.”

Reporters cite several casualties of the softer era: stories involving north Texas-based American Airlines, Ross Perot’s run for president, and a north Texas congressman (whom one editor referred to as a “good friend” of the newspaper); coverage of tax and bond elections in 1998 that benefited the billionaire Tom Hicks, Ross Perot, Jr., and a slew of developers; and a business editor at the paper forced to step down after, among other things, he resisted giving preferential coverage to the Belo company itself.

The Morning News won a Pulitzer for breaking news photography this year, its first in a decade that saw many of its best reporters depart. Adams left in 1992. Two years later Hanners moved to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 2001 Reaves left to edit an alternative paper, The Fort Worth Weekly. Malone joined her a year later, and both are convinced they made the right decision. Malone no longer has the resources he had at the Morning News, “but I can work on stories that make a difference,” he says. “That’s what I want to do with my career — to make a difference. I had lost that ability at The Dallas Morning News.”

In the spring of 2001, Robert W. Decherd, chairman, president, and CEO of Belo, ushered Jim Moroney into his office. Decherd shut the door, turned and asked Moroney if he wanted to be publisher of The Dallas Morning News. Moroney responded: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

He had good reason to be stunned. Like Decherd, Moroney is a great-grandson of G. B. Dealey, the founder of the Morning News. But in his twenty-three years with Belo he had had virtually no news or newspaper experience. His background is in sales, television, and corporate machinations.

Still, Decherd thought he had the right man. “Jim Moroney has spent his entire professional life believing in and implementing a philosophy that our news product defines our company,” he says. “I would submit that men and women who have that perspective lead great newspapers and great television stations to their full potential.”

In May 2001 Decherd announced Moroney as publisher and Mong, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Morning News, as editor. Moroney first focused on advertising, marketing, and finance, installing his own choices as boss. Mong ran the news side with managing editor Stuart Wilk, whom Mong had brought to the Morning News from the National Enquirer in 1980.

Even though he initially stayed away from the news side, Moroney says he sensed some trouble there.“I had always heard there were sacred cows at the Morning News,” he tells CJR. “You put that notion in a newsroom, and you are on a downward spiral toward mediocrity.” Moroney says he asked Mong if that were true; Mong said no. “Everything I ever felt that needed to be in the paper, got in the paper, from the time I was managing editor” in 1990, Mong told CJR. Wilk, who replaced Mong as m.e. in 1996, agrees.

But try persuading Todd Bensman of that. Beginning in 1999, Bensman published dozens of hard-hitting stories about Terrell Bolton, Dallas’s first black police chief. The stories reported that Bolton may have ordered the police to ease enforcement at a topless bar; that Bolton drastically reduced his department’s role in an anti-terrorism task force with the FBI; that Bolton tried to have the head of the Dallas FBI office transferred; that Bolton improperly demoted several top commanders, prompting a federal lawsuit that cost the city millions of dollars.

Some black community leaders were outraged. Protestors burned newspapers in front of the Morning News’s downtown headquarters. Bensman claimed that Bolton and his allies pressured management to stop the stories. And according to Bensman, it worked: “In July 2001 the city editor told me, ‘You are never to write about Terrell Bolton again.’’’

“The politics of the situation were stark,” says Bensman, now an investigative producer at KTVT, the CBS-owned station in Dallas. Egerton, brought in temporarily as Bensman’s editor, confirms that management obstructed coverage of the police chief. “I do know that stories were being killed. Some were edited to death,” he said. “Management succumbed to political pressure. It was extremely disturbing to people in the newsroom.”

Wilk calls these accounts nonsense. “There were no stories about Bolton that met our reporting standards that we failed to publish,” he said. But Bensman wrote thirty-one stories about Bolton between November 1999 and July 2001. Over the next six months, Bensman wrote not a word about the police chief. This despite the fact that he and two other reporters were tipped to a new scandal in Bolton’s department: in September 2001 a defense attorney told Bensman that the Dallas police had arrested more than two dozen Hispanic men for dealing drugs — specifically cocaine and methamphetamine, according to tests conducted by the cops. But, said the source, tests conducted by the district attorney’s office determined that the “drugs” were gypsum.

Bensman said he knew he would not be allowed to pursue the tip, so he sent an e-mail to the appropriate editor, hoping another reporter would be assigned to the story. Months passed. In November, two reporters, Holly Becka and Tim Wyatt, who covered the Dallas County district attorney’s office, got tips on the same story from separate sources. They, too, informed their editor, who said she had it covered.

Six weeks later, WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas, broke the story — resulting in the revocation of charges against more than fifty defendants. For its work, the television station, also owned by Belo, was awarded the duPont-Columbia University and Peabody awards, the highest honors in broadcast journalism. Wilk concedes that the newspaper should have broken the story. “We clearly did not handle it as aggressively as we should have,” he says.

Wyatt got a new tip in February: he learned that in 2000 a Dallas beer distributor and philanthropist named Bill Barrett had been kicked and scratched by his wife. Angela Barrett — a board member of a battered-women’s shelter, a convicted felon, and thirty-one years younger than her husband — was charged with assault. Bill Barrett had asked the Dallas county district attorney, Bill Hill — who had received $2,000 in campaign contributions from him — to drop the charge. It was dismissed, six days after being filed, despite a tough policy on prosecuting domestic abuse. Wyatt wrote a story.

Barrett, whose family had contributed $250,000 to The Dallas Morning News charity fund drive, says he asked Mong and Wilk to kill the story. They did. Wyatt was devastated: “The message sent was that the story was a sacred cow, and we couldn’t touch it.” Mong and Wilk say Barrett did not get favored treatment. A few weeks later, two reporters at the paper wrote a story about a district attorney in a neighboring county who chose not to prosecute two campaign donors accused of assaulting their spouses. The Morning News ran it on page one.

Jeffrey Weiss, a religion reporter at the Morning News, is a sixteen-year veteran with no aspirations to be an investigative reporter. He is no rebel, but he understands the ripple effect when a story is stepped on. “You don’t have to be bit more than once before you decide not to go back,” he says. “The people who pursue investigative reporting at The Dallas Morning News do so out of an excess of determination.”

On November 7, 2002, Mong delivered a speech to several hundred employees of the Morning News, in the same hotel where Moroney would give his “Revolution” speech fourteen months later. Mong, like Moroney, delivered a long speech. Like Moroney, he called for improvement: “Don’t you think we can be so much better?” he said. “You and I know that we can be.” But he also defended the paper against “voices in our newsroom, speculating” that the Morning News was slipping, and was not as good as it was ten years ago. “Clearly, in nearly every measurable way, we are far better today,” he told the crowd, ticking off more than a dozen areas of coverage. The audience responded with polite applause.

These days, Mong endorses Moroney’s call for a revolution in the culture of the Morning News, and he believes he is the right person, with the publisher, to lead it. “We are on the same page on what needs to be done,” he says. Moroney agrees. He says that several months ago Mong put together a list of people of the quality that he and Mong “are methodically trying to attract to the newspaper to increase the number of great journalists.”

Nearly a year after Mong’s speech, on October 31, 2003, Moroney held a brown-bag meeting with some eighteen Morning News reporters. Managers were barred. The publisher and the reporters talked for two hours. “Unprecedented,” says Weiss.

At first, reporters were reluctant to open up. Moroney assured them that there would be no retribution for what they said. Finally, one reporter told the publisher that “we have a climate here in which reporters are treated with contempt.” Reporters talked about stories killed, delayed, or watered down. “We told him we thought the paper was in real trouble and that the news operation was weak,” says Egerton. To fix it, he added, “there has to be a change in leadership.” Moroney asked questions and promised change.

At first the rebuilding moved slowly. Keven Anne Wiley was hired away from The Arizona Republic to rejuvenate the editorial page. Maples was allowed to more than double her projects staff to five, including a computer-assisted reporting editor. The serious shakeup, Moroney told CJR, would come at the end of April, when Mong would announce more than a dozen management changes. The new managing editor would be George Rodrigue, the head of Belo’s news operations in Washington, D.C., and the only reporter to win two Pulitzers at the Morning News. The new metro editor would be someone from outside the News, the first time that has happened in more than fifty years. Maud Beelman, of the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., would be named to the newly created position of enterprise editor on the metro desk. The newsroom remains on high alert. “What Moroney has done is create expectations,” says Weiss. “He could just as easily fail as succeed.”