Note: This article uses “The Dallas News” and “The Dallas Morning News” interchangeably, as the DallasNews holding company owns and issues The Dallas Morning News newspaper.
Founded in 1885, the Dallas Morning News is a remarkably historied company. The newspaper itself is the most popular daily newspaper in Texas, with about 7 million visitors per month, and they claim to be the oldest continually operating business in the state. With nine Pulitzer Prizes and various other journalistic awards, the newspaper is generally well-regarded, but it does also contain some political bias.
The paper generally leans Somewhat Conservative, by Biasly’s bias-rating algorithm, but there’s a difference between bias and reliability. It may be partial towards presenting the facts for one side, but is that information accurate? At Biasly, we endeavor to evaluate the accuracy and dependability of all media outlets. Let us investigate the reliability and accuracy of the Dallas Morning News.
Does Reliability Matter?
Reliability, in general, refers to how trustworthy or accurate information – in this case, a news source – is. If we consider this definition, it quickly becomes clear why reliability is important in media sources. If we can’t trust the things we read, there isn’t much of a point in continuing to consume content from that source at all. So how can we gauge the reliability of a news source anyways?
There are several potential measures of reliability to look out for when trying to determine whether a media source is reliable or not. Red flags for an unreliable article can include the presence of wild or unsubstantiated claims, facts dependent on other unreliable sources, a heavy use of opinionated language, and more. Some indicators of a reliable news source, on the other hand, include things like:
- Absence of subjective/opinionated language in articles
- Credible sources cited (e.g., neutral sources, .gov, .edu websites)
- Facts and statistics backed by multiple relevant outside sources
- Use of primary sources when possible (e.g., interviews, quotes)
- Information that remains consistent across news sources
So How Does the Dallas News Fare in its Reliability?
The political reliability index developed by Biasly objectively assesses news organizations’ accuracy and trustworthiness. The Dallas Morning News’ overall Reliability Score has been rated as ‘Fair’ by Biasly. This rating is a weighted average of two distinct scores: the Fact Analysis Score and the Source Analysis Score, each evaluating separate components of the paper’s reliability. This news source hasn’t been rated by analysts and therefore doesn’t have a Fact Analysis Score. These ratings are as follows in the next two paragraphs:
Dallas News’ Source Analysis Score is ‘Fair,’ which suggests readers can trust some of the sources, links, and quotes provided by the news source. This score, which is based on A.I., focuses on assessing the quality of sources and quotes used including their number, lengths, uniqueness, and diversity.
It’s important to note that these scores are based on percentages and averages, so individual articles could be more or less trustworthy depending on the context, author, and various other factors.
Let’s analyze some of the supporting data for these rankings and discuss what to watch out for while searching for trustworthy news sources.
The Dallas Morning News Accuracy and Reliability
The credibility of news organizations is significantly impacted by bias and political orientation. Like numerous other media organizations, the Dallas News has occasionally been accused of prioritizing their political agenda above facts. We’ll evaluate the integrity of their news stories and deduce how well the publication supports their assertions with evidence to see whether this is indeed the case, as well as checking for selection and omission bias as we assess the articles’ veracity.
Selection bias is when stories and facts are selected or deselected, often on ideological grounds, to create a narrative in support of the news sources’ ideology. Omission bias, on the other hand, is when different opinions and political views regarding a situation are left out so that the reader is only exposed to the ideological perspective supported by the author. It’s important to keep in mind these two types of biases – and the differences between them – when trying to evaluate an article’s accuracy.
Biasly assigns a percentage score for accuracy, with one being the least accurate and 100 being the most. Ratings are calculated by weighing assertions with supporting evidence, the number of reliable internal sources, and the number of reliable external sources employed. A full page at Biasly’s website includes dependability and accuracy ratings for newly released news stories by The Dallas Morning News. As we previously stated, according to the reports analytics have assessed, this paper has a Fair reliability score. This score can vary from article to article, though, and the most extreme variations in dependability are caused by bias – notably omission and selection bias.
Consider as a contrast the New York Times, which has a “Medium Liberal” bias and a “Fair” reliability score according to Biasly. For example, they had one article that had an “Excellent” reliability score titled “U.S. Defends Detention of Afghan at Guantánamo Despite Pullout,” and another article called “The Most Galling Part of the Whole Eric Adams Affair” that had a “Poor” reliability score. These articles provide a great example of how stories displaying political leaning are less reliable than neutral ones, as well as how widely reliability can vary from article to article even if both are published by the same company.
But appearances can be deceiving. The first of some of their articles in their PolitiFact section, “Live fact-checking Kamala Harris’ MSNBC interview with Stephanie Ruhle”, scores in the center for bias but earns a poor reliability score. Many factors that determine the reliability score, including opposite viewpoint and sources are completely missing, both quote length and multiple quotes (other metrics used by the Biasly algorithm) are poor, and the byline is completely blank so the reader has no information on the author’s potential bias.
Another article from this page, “Kamala Harris exaggerates the scale of Donald Trump’s inheritance before starting his career,” has a very different rating. This article has a 40% bias, making it moderately conservative, yet it has a good reliability score. There is still a complete absence of information on the author and any opposing viewpoints, which contributes to the strong bias score, but quote length, multiple quotes, unique sources, and multiple sources all rank as excellent, which drastically increases this article’s reliability.
These examples underscore a few important understandings for media literacy as a whole:
- No one factor alone determines if an article is biased or not; reliable or not. Both are sliding scales and are affected by multiple factors, each of which must be considered for a holistic evaluation of the article’s accuracy.
- Bias and reliability are completely separate and distinct metrics. An article can be unbiased but not reliable, or biased yet reliable, or any other combination of the two, as seen in the examples above.
- Every article is different and should be evaluated as such – even if they’re from the same source. These top two articles – which were both identically framed as nonpartisan fact-checks – had radically different bias and reliability scores.
We will take a closer look at more examples like this below, providing a further investigation into the reliability of Dallas News articles. This will include its use of selection bias and omission bias, as well as the quality of its sources.
Quality of Sources and Facts Used
Dallas News can be good at using reliable sources from both sides of the ideological divide, but this is not the case for every article. For instance, “The State Fair of Texas gun ban is a misguided policy” by Rob Chadwick and Michael Cargill doesn’t use any quotes, relying instead on their own personal experience and anecdotal evidence.
Beyond not including any quotes, The Dallas News has also gotten itself into hot water before by misquoting its supposed sources. They’ve retracted several stories in the past or had pieces that were not factual, including one notable instance admitted here in which they published supposed quotes from a public official that were both false and completely fabricated. The newspaper has been continuously publishing for hundreds of years now, and a certain amount of error is arguably inevitable, but egregious cases like the one seen here certainly cast some doubt on the truthfulness of other sources and articles presented as facts.
Both these examples focus specifically on quotes as a measurement of reliability for a handful of reasons. Having more quotes is a great way to examine how many unique sources they cite and how many times each one is cited, and having longer quotes makes it more likely that the quote is faithful to the source material – not taken out of context or twisted in any way.
This article, “Meet the Ken Paxton whistleblowers”, is a great example of proper quote usage. The article covers several individuals in particular, and almost every single one is interviewed, their own words used extensively throughout the piece. The long quotes increase the reliability of the article as a whole by ensuring none of their words are presented without context, and they’re often supported by follow-up quotes as well to clarify some of the sentiments expressed in other quotes.
There are more indicators of reliability than just quotes, though.
This article, “A path forward for nuclear energy in Texas,” uses a variety of sources to report on their topic. These include the following:
- Two internal links to other Dallas News articles providing background information on relevant nuclear reactors (Somewhat Conservative)
- A link to texas.gov explaining a task force (Neutral)
- Input from Stephen Perkin, chief operating officer of the American Conservation Coalition (Very Conservative)
- A link to world-nuclear-news.org explaining another country’s policy (Neutral)
The number of sources used may be a little low, but considering the length of the article, it isn’t a huge point of concern. The uniqueness of the sources may be a much larger concern here, as a large percentage of the total sources are simply references to other articles by the same news source. The nod to the American Conservation Coalition was also very brief, with no direct quotes or tangible remarks – instead only saying that “the Legislature can help speed things up and allow the state to take a leading position.”
Furthermore, most of the relevant and contentious aspects of nuclear reactors are glossed over and unsourced. They assert without a source that “The newer reactors are smaller, cleaner, and safer,” and that development will take “years if not decades”. Both of these are very relevant ideas in the debate over whether nuclear energy investment should be expanded, and by the end of the article, they draw conclusions on that issue without actually examining factors such as these. The article is accurate to the issue overall but conveniently leaves out contested aspects of the plan.
Selection and Omission Bias
Recall the articles discussed earlier. We discussed how each of those sources has its own partisan bias, but selection bias is present as well. Of the four headlines seen there, three are criticizing Democratic politicians, with only one examining Trump’s remarks. Taken alone, with no consideration of how these stories were selected, one may think that the Democratic politicians were more prone to false statements, or required more fact-checking. The selection bias is clear in that 75% of the headlines visible there are critical of only left-wing politicians.
Omission bias is harder to spot but plays an arguably large role in shaping a narrative. As explained above, omission bias is when different opinions and political views regarding a situation are left out so that the reader is only exposed to the ideological perspective supported by the author. In this case, not only does it primarily criticize Harris and Walz, but it ignores several high-profile cases of misinformation from Trump. It is the exclusion of stories that would make conservative politicians look bad just as much as the inclusion of those for liberal politicians that crafts the slightly conservative narrative that Dallas News is known to have.
In the article we discussed earlier, “A path forward for nuclear energy in Texas”, they had three external sources. One of these was a US government site, and another was an outlet examining international news. Their only political source was the American Conservation Coalition, and it’s outright stated in the article to lean conservative. There is no liberal source to balance out any bias this may introduce. This is another example of selection and omission bias – just on a smaller scale, within one article. It may not seem like a big deal when considering how short the article is and how few total sources they have, but when they have only one partisan source, they refuse to account for others’ perspectives and try to portray the issue from only one point of view. By omitting contradictory points of view, the authors reduce the reliability of their article, making stories like these sound like opinion pieces.
In opinion pieces, issues with factuality, sources, selection, and omission are frequently present, but now that we’ve enumerated typical trustworthiness indications, you’re more equipped to spot unreliable news.
So is the Dallas Morning News reliable?
The Dallas News is a semi-reliable news source with an adequate reputation for journalistic integrity. The bias and reliability of each article will vary, but overall, the outlet is Somewhat Conservative with a Fair reliability score. The more you research media reliability and accuracy, the simpler it will be for you to spot problems with sources, selection, omission, and factuality. To help with this in the future, you can use Biasly’s News Bias Checker to uncover reliability problems and assist you in finding the most accurate and dependable news.