Senator Who Paper Sought to Shame
Set for Keynote at Event it Promotes
Capitol Inside
September 21, 2023
The Dallas Morning News revealed on Thursday that a Texas Senate Republican who the newspaper's editors branded as shameful two weeks ago would the the keynote speaker a week from now at event that's designed to honor journalists and other advocates for sunshine in government.
Biggest Texas Newspapers
Shocked by Trial Verdict Like
Texas House GOP Leaders
The Texarkana Gazette asked a simple question in an editorial after Texas Senate Republicans voted to acquit Ken Paxton at his impeachment trial. Is anyone surprised?
That would be an understatement in the case of the editors at the largest daily newspapers in Texas. They were clearly dumbfounded by the Senate vote to acquit after all but identical coverage that led readers to think Paxton would be impeached.
The Texarkana paper apparently relied on the Associated Press for daily reports during and before the trial. The AP maintained its objectivity throughout the case.
Capitol Inside was on the same page with the small paper in the state's northeast corner. We predicted the verdict correctly during the trial's first week and explained exactly why Paxton would would win as the historic event progressed. Here's a sample of the big newspapers' editorial outrage and disbelief.
Impeachment Verdict is Disgrace
Shameful Six Deserve Reproach
Texas Politics Dunn for with Verdict
Verdict is Injury for Conservatism
Senate Verdict is Sad Day for Texas
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The DMN editorial board that GOP State Senator Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham would be the keynote speaker at a Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas luncheon just 12 days after she voted to acquit Attorney General Ken Paxton at his impeachment trial with 15 Republican colleagues.
The editorial board buried the news on the FOI event at the end of an opinion piece that called for a ban on encrypted and ephemeral apps that Paxton allegedly used to cover his tracks to Nate Paul's house and a girlfriend's apartment as the enigmatic Uber passenger Dave P. The editors argued that Proton Mail, Signal and similar sites make it easy for Texas politicians like Paxton to skirt the state's open records law.
But the DMN editorial board neglected to mention that it had castigated Kolkhorst and five other Senate Republicans as the "shameful six" two weeks ago as a consequence of their votes to dismiss the House case against Paxton as the first act of business on the trial's first day.
"In our view, their decision falls on the spectrum between cowardice and cynicism," the editors wrote. "They either fear the very partisans who supported them in their primaries, or they are so cynical about our democracy that they place their own party and personal interests above those of the state and the people they should serve."
The editors acknowledged that Kolkhorst voted for acquittal on the final day of the trial on Saturday. But they left out the part on how a lawmaker who they portrayed as a cowardly cynic would be the featured guest at the ceremony that gives journalists an opportunity to salute themselves. There's no way to know if that had been an inadvertent or convenient admission to hide whatever shame they may feel about the recruitment of a senator they'd excoriated with language that was historically insulting and based on a lack of understanding about the case.
The DMN editors weren't the only ones who erupted in shock, anger and righteous indignance at the state's largest newspapers when the verdict didn't go the way that they'd led readers to believe it would before and throughout the trial. The Houston Chronicle editorial suggested that Senate Republicans withered under the heat with their votes to let Paxton in a fit of outrage with a creative touch on the day after the verdict caught them by complete surprise. .
"In the heart of the city on a Saturday morning, inside the august Capitol chambers of the Texas Senate, a group of senators were facing, as they were frequently reminded, the most momentous vote of their lives," the Chron editors wrote. "They dared contemplate a new day, an aurora of possibility. Perhaps not surprisingly, they blinked."
The Chronicle editors appeared to demonstrate how clueless the editors at the major Texas papers had been about the case. No senators blinked on either side of the aisle by any stretch of the imagination. The vote was purely partisan with all of the Senate Democrats voting to convict the AG while all but two Republicans voted to convict. To say that the Democrats all made their decisions on a preponderance of the evidence and the Republicans ignored it shows how out of touch with a case that was predictable from the outset.
The lawmakers who invited to be the featured guesst the upcoming and her fellow senators in the so-called Shameful Six gave GOP colleagues all the cover that they would need to vote the way they always were going to do regardless of the evidence. That's the way the Senate majority works.
The reporters for the biggest papers had the job of trying to beat the others with the speed of posts on X that gave provided up-to-date summaries on the highlights of the trial each day with witness names and the testimony they provided in support of the House bid to impeach. But their editors failed to get the journalists at the scene to step back so they could examine the case through an objective lens to discover an abundance of obvious holes that House managers and the legendary lawyers they hired either made no apparent effort to fill or completely missed. The reporters who are talented but relatively inexperienced professionals were too busy tweeting with the play-by-play competition.
The papers may not be aware that the one-sided nature of their coverage could have played a significant role in the final verdict that has piqued their wrath. The DMN editors have a legitimate case for a prohibition on the use of Proton Mail, Signal and other such apps as a gaping loophole in a Texas open records that's been viewed as one of the nation's strongest.
But they could use the Freedom of Information Foundation meeting as a stage for them to take a hard look at the quality of their coverage in the impeachment saga and other huge stories in recent years like the Uvalde elementary school shooting and the House expulsion of Republican Byron Slaton just weeks before the vote for Paxton's impeachment in May.
House Republican leaders have been in a state of shock and denial about the weaknesses of their case - saying that there's nothing they would change about it if they had the chance. But people who refuse to admit when they've been wrong or failed rarely get any better at what they do. Soul searching should be their highest priority in the wake of the impeachment.
The biggest publications all ran articles that featured key "takeaways" from the trial as it progressed. But they missed the real story on the impeachment, a date rape drug scandal and the first expulsion in the House in almost 100 years as well. It may be coincidence that ouse Republican leaders were behind all three of those.
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