Dallas Morning News, Epitome of Legacy Media Failures
People do not trust the media. That’s precisely why The Dallas Express was founded — to provide media coverage that people can trust again. The Dallas Morning News, with its ever-declining subscription base and revenues, perfectly exemplifies the ongoing failure of the legacy far-left media.
DX publisher Monty Bennett once commented that the only reason much of the media exists is to try and make anyone who’s not a radical like themselves look evil or ignorant. This appears to be the objective of Dallas Morning News CEO Grant Moise and his so-called “journalists,” including “equity” reporter Arcelia Martin and business reporter Natalie Walters (who never actually held a job in business). They are all incompetent.
Legacy Media: Prioritizing Political Narratives Over News
During the COVID-inspired financial crisis, DX publisher Monty Bennett’s businesses were under siege. Airlines and hotels were hit the hardest of all. Airlines received billions in free government aid. By contrast, the hotel industry didn’t receive free government aid but was directed to tap into the provisions of the CARES Act’s PPP Loan program, which was engineered in part to provide loans to hotels. Ashford Hospitality, Bennett’s hotel company, applied for these desperately needed loans to keep the company and its employees afloat.
Ashford had already furloughed approximately 90% of its 12,000 workers by the time the program was made available. The PPP program provided funds to rehire some of the workers. As was entirely appropriate, the loan program had strict regulations in place to prevent the company or owner from personally benefiting from these funds. Additionally, due to specific conditions of the program, most hotels, including Ashford’s, were required to repay the loans in full with no forgiveness.
Yet because the teetering, old world media is more invested in promoting their political agendas and narratives than reporting the truth, and because many of these media executives and so-called ‘journalists’ like Moise, Martin, and Walters do not understand economics or business, they manufactured a completely false narrative that the PPP program was only created for small businesses (which is where much of the fraud that afflicted the program occurred) and not for larger and/or public companies. The media then went on a breathless frenzy promoting this false narrative while trying to shame larger or public companies out of taking PPP program proceeds.
In the face of that pressure, Bennett’s view was this: If he didn’t stand up for his employees when it mattered most, what kind of leader would he be? Of course, the media failed to report that Bennett would receive none of the benefits of the loans personally, and that those proceeds would only benefit his displaced workers and maybe help the company survive.
Bennett withstood withering media criticism for sticking to his principles. He was doxxed and even received death threats. But the legacy media does not care about the truth and they got precisely the reaction they wanted. The firestorm they created frightened Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin so much that he retroactively changed the Treasury regulations which forced Ashford to return the loan monies they had already received. This regulatory change was deployed so quickly that Ashford had not yet even had the opportunity to hire back any of its workers.
The Dallas Morning News then had the temerity to write a hit piece labeling Monty Bennett as ‘The Face of Corporate Greed.’ Give me a break. What a lie.
Here’s a leader who put his neck on the line for his employees. The easy way out would have been to immediately cave to the mob. This kind of nonsense is why the business community, political conservatives, independents, and non-woke Democrats despise the legacy media. Bennett’s real crime, according to the Dallas Morning News themselves, is being a Republican donor in a red state (Gasp!) and having the gall to publish a non-woke, local news alternative to their victim-centric propaganda rag that continues to lose readers, revenue (12% YoY decline), and employees (19% YoY decline) at staggering rates.
More of the Same at The Dallas Morning News…
Wednesday, the Dallas Morning News printed an article about a New York activist attacking one of Bennett’s publicly traded companies. As is typical in these proxy fights, the activist threw all kinds of mud at Ashford and Bennett just to see what would stick, knowing the lazy media lapdogs would be compliant and happily do their dirty work for them.
True to form, the Dallas Morning News not only reprinted the activist’s garbage verbatim but bookended the article with a reference back to their erroneous and malicious 2020 “Face of Greed” article about Bennett. That’s how they treat you if you don’t share their radical left ideology, and you threaten what used to be their exclusive ability to control what news you see and how they want you to think.
Personally, I’ve had enough. As an insider who knows the facts about these fake news stories, and as a former executive officer for a public company for over a decade, I had to speak out and set the record straight. Monty, like all of us, isn’t perfect, but he fought very hard to do the right thing for his investors and employees during COVID. At the same time, the Dallas Morning News and their other establishment media buddies exploited the situation “for clicks” and bullied us all about masks, school and business closures, and, of course, vaccines.
To this day the broader media has still never told the truth about the real origins of COVID, Fauci and the NIH’s role in funding the development of gain of function research in Wuhan, the Big Lie and coverup, the harm done to children who missed at least a year of school, vaccines that weren’t actually vaccines, etc.
Where’s the Journalistic Accountability?
Where’s the journalistic accountability of our government and our political leaders who grossly mismanaged COVID and got so many things wrong? There’s a million of these stories still to be told. They won’t be told, however, because they aren’t convenient to their political agenda and the narrative they want to promote. Instead, they focus their sights on a successful businessman who simply tried to keep his employees paid and business afloat. And once again, why exactly? Because he’s not politically far-left like they are. It’s just that simple.
It’s no wonder these outlets and their business model are in their death throes while alternatives like The Dallas Express are quickly embraced by a public exhausted with being force-fed nonstop lies from the radical woke left about race issues, the climate, so-called gender politics, Palestine/Israel, Ukraine, COVID, vaccine efficacy, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ashley Biden’s diary, January 6th, and on and on and on…
Just last week the Dallas Morning News attempted to mansplain to its readers on how toll roads are racist with this headline.
Haven’t we all had enough of this nonsense?
Go Woke, Go Broke
This historical media business model is empirically dying while The Dallas Express and other alternative news outlets that promote actual news are thriving. Look no further than the Dallas Morning News’ latest financial results for evidence.
DALLAS, May 15, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — DallasNews Corporation (Nasdaq: DALN) (the “Company”) today reported a first quarter 2024 net loss of $1.4 million, or $(0.25) per share, and an operating loss of $1.8 million. In the first quarter of 2023, the Company reported a net loss of $2.6 million, or $(0.49) per share, and an operating loss of $2.8 million.
More astounding than the ongoing failure of the Dallas Morning News is the total lack of self-awareness for these results and why they’re no longer trusted or credible. Wednesday’s baseless attack on Bennett that recycled prior false news is just another in a never-ending fountain of daily examples.
The good news is that while Moise, Walters, and Martin continue to double down on their tired game of attempting to sully the character and integrity of good people simply because their political views don’t comport with their own extreme, intolerant ideologies, what they’re really writing is the Dallas Morning News’ own epitaph.
We’ll send flowers to the funeral.