Grant Moise, CEO and publisher of The Dallas Morning News, announces a new initiative to facilitate reader feedback and foster trust.
The Dallas Morning News
Fifty years ago, when Gallup first asked Americans if they trusted newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, roughly seven in 10 respondents said yes. That number slipped below 50% in the early 2000s and hit new lows in 2016 and again in 2022. Gallup’s most recent annual survey put national trust in the media at 28%, the lowest mark since the question was first asked in the 1970s.
Pew Research, tracking a related but distinct measure, found this year that trust in national news organizations fell 11 points in a matter of months, part of a 20-point decline since Pew began asking in 2016.
There is, however, a meaningful exception to this story, and it’s the one that matters most to us: local news. Pew’s most recent data shows 70% of Americans still express at least some trust in their local news organizations. That’s more than twice the confidence Gallup finds in “the media” as a broad, national, faceless category. Americans of both parties tend to agree that local journalists know their communities, cover the issues that matter to them, and hold local leaders accountable. The gap between how people see “the media” in the abstract and how they see the journalists covering their own city remains wide and real.
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We think that gap is an opportunity, and it’s also a responsibility. If North Texas residents are more inclined to trust us than they are to trust “the media” writ large, we want to earn that trust every single day, not assume it. That starts with something simple: making it easier for you to ask us why we covered a story the way we did, why we chose one headline over another, why a name was or wasn’t included, or why we made an editing decision you disagreed with … and getting a real answer.
This isn’t the first time we’ve tried to build that kind of accountability into the way we work. In 2024 and 2025, we employed a part-time public editor who was assigned to field reader questions and provide professional feedback regarding our coverage. It was a start, but your feedback told us it wasn’t enough because the role didn’t have the time or the standing to dig into every question, and too often it meant we were handing off the job of explaining ourselves to someone outside the room where our decisions get made.
So, we’re doing two things differently.
First, we’re turning that part-time function into a full-time position called the Reader Response Editor. This person’s job is to be your direct line into the newsroom, helping track down your questions, talking to the journalists involved, and making sure an editor responsible for that content gets back to you with a real answer. It’s an investment in being more accessible to you. Starting today, if you have concerns or compliments about our coverage, your subscription or any of our work, we invite you to email readerresponse@dallasnews.com. We will track concerns and responses to ensure we are hearing you, and you are getting feedback. This is in addition to our letters to the editor, where we publish readers’ points of view on a wide range of subjects.
Second, we’re launching a new monthly column written on a rotating basis by me, Executive Editor Colleen McCain Nelson or Editorial Page Editor Rudolph Bush. We think that when you have questions about how we do our jobs, how we decide what’s news, how we handle anonymous sources, how the newsroom and the opinion pages stay separate, how we correct our mistakes, you deserve to hear the answers directly from the people in charge, not have that conversation outsourced to a third party. We won’t pretend our journalism is perfect. We will show you the reasoning behind it, so you can judge it for yourself.
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Trust in institutions doesn’t come back because an institution asks for it. It comes back one honest answer at a time. That’s the bet we’re making with this expanded role and this new column, and we’d rather make that bet in the open, with you, than not make it at all.
Grant Moise is publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News.
Have thoughts about this? Send a letter to the editor using our letters form or email letters@dallasnews.com. Letters should be no more than 200 words and include the first and last name of the writer and city of residence.