Leaders behind the public safety-themed Dallas HERO ballot initiatives — approved by citizens despite fierce opposition from the city establishment — slammed the Dallas Morning News for making baseless, misleading accusations about the propositions.
HERO Executive Director Pete Marocco issued a scathing missive to DMN VP Rudolph Bush, lambasting him as a “sore loser” and accusing the far-left paper of drifting into “moonbattery.”
“Dallas Morning News readership is in the toilet where it rightly belongs. Your bigoted propaganda is belligerent to truth, nothing more than a corrupt political rag. Your absurd claims that Dallas Hero is a ‘far-right group’ is meritless chicanery. Likewise your claim of a ‘deceptive campaign’ to garner 170,000 public record signatures for non-partisan propositions, is an outrage,” the Dallas Hero statement read.
Dallas HERO also highlighted how some propositions that were on ballot passed despite opposition from the Dallas Morning News and the “elite establishment.”
“Proposition S, pre-petition polled at 72% support, 9% against in South Dallas, districts 4,5,7 and 8. In West Dallas, districts 1,3 and 6, 62% support, 14% against. That is raw pre-political data. DMN’s laughable coverage of the propositions would have been comedy if it weren’t pure alarmist dog-whistling,” Dallas Hero statement said.
The HERO propositions, were listed as amendments S, T and U on the ballot.
These amendments called for creating performance incentives for the City manager, increase pay for police officers, require the city to hire roughly 1,000 additional officers, improve the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, and enable citizens to file lawsuits against City officials who do not abide by the Dallas City Charter, Dallas City Code, or state laws.
Amendment S, which allows residents to sue the city if officials don’t comply with local ordinances and charter amendments, overwhelmingly approved.
Amendment T, related to the City Manager, failed. However, Amendment U, which would boost police staffing and ensure 4,000 Dallas officers are on the beat, in addition to boosting their pay, was comfortably approved.
Opponents of the amendments outspent HERO fans by nearly four-to-one. And far-left media outlets used buckets of ink on rallying opposition.
“Your conspired elitist attack failed,” Marocco wrote to the DMN.
Marocco has underscored how the ballot initiatives allowed citizens to get their “power” back, and to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions and actions.
DMN, conversely, recently wrote an opinion item bashing Dallas Republican Mayor Eric Johnson in the wake of the Election Day results.
The piece was titled: “This election, Mayor Eric Johnson let Dallas down.”
In the article, DMN criticized the mayor for not doing enough to oppose the three propositions on the ballot, a stance that was also criticized by former Dallas mayors.
DMN argued the city could face a ‘potential avalanche of lawsuits’ and that adding an additional 1,000 officers is an impossible task
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, DMN parent company DallasNews Corporation is committed to “social justice.”
DallasNews Corporation has a stated commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” on its webpage.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion are embedded in the hiring, promotion, and development of our employees, in reaching diverse audiences with our content, and in choosing the companies with which we do business,” the page reads.
The Dallas Express reached out to DMN but did not get a response.