It started with a snide email from a district attorney to an investigative reporter.
Miles Moffeit of the Dallas Morning News had asked John Creuzot, the top prosecutor for Dallas County, whether his office wanted more oversight of investigations into city police brutality — the subject of a recent series Moffeit co-wrote for the newspaper.
“Well, it looks like you answered your own question,” Creuzot replied July 19. “Congratulations! See how smart you are! Yep, Pulitzer-Prize Nominated for good reason!”
“Thanks, Riddler,” Moffeit wrote, ending their tense exchange.
Moffeit used Creuzot’s cryptic and sarcastic response to report a week later that the D.A. wanted more power over the police department’s use-of-force investigations. Creuzot did not dispute the story until September, when Morning News editors contacted him for reasons that remain unclear — and he told them that Moffeit misrepresented his stance.
The reporter’s subsequent departure from the Dallas Morning News — after his bosses published a rare and humiliating front-page retraction of his story — has left one of the nation’s premier regional newsrooms in turmoil three months later.
The Morning News’s series of investigative reports on police brutality, which many hoped would be a Pulitzer contender, was halted prematurely. And many of Moffeit’s former colleagues remain bitter about top editors’ reaction to what they see as a relatively minor mistake — an “inartful paraphrase,” as Moffeit described it — and concerned that it reflects a larger lack of managerial willingness to stand up to local officials who challenge their work.
“The most pressing issue here is not my mistake,” Moffeit wrote in an email to editors after his resignation. “It is the fact that The News’ managers succumbed to pressure from Dallas politicians who want to mask a corrupt criminal justice system.”
On Dec. 4, the newspaper’s union published an open letter signed by 89 of its journalists, who said they were “disturbed” by top editors’ decisions. They also called for the retraction to be corrected.
Management “caved when Dallas political figures complained about [Moffeit’s] investigative project,” the union wrote, and its “disproportionate and heavy-handed discipline” has created a “culture of fear” in the newsroom.
Morning News executive editor Katrice Hardy told The Washington Post that the newspaper’s personnel decisions are “wholly independent of pressure or complaints from elected officials.”
She added in an email: “As soon as The News learned of questions surrounding this story and related reporting, we moved quickly and purposefully to conduct an internal and third-party investigation. These results led to a retraction, which is exceptionally rare for The News.”
Moffeit joined the Morning News in 2010 from the Denver Post, where his reporting on mishandled DNA evidence made him a Pulitzer finalist in 2008. But his tense relationship with Creuzot dates to 2019, when the investigative reporter wrote an article asking why the district attorney dropped a corruption probe.
He told The Post that he later was told that Creuzot personally called people quoted in that story to ask whether Moffeit misquoted them. Moffeit called it a “protracted campaign of trying to intimidate my sources.”
Creuzot told The Post that he doesn’t remember calling Moffeit’s sources for the 2019 story and that it doesn’t sound like something he would do. But animosity seems to have lingered: Creuzot said the reporter “makes things up,” though he would not cite specific examples of any fabrications.
Creuzot’s apparent irritation with Moffeit carried into their July email exchange.
Moffeit pressed Creuzot to say explicitly whether he wanted an oversight agreement with the Dallas Police Department — “if in fact that’s what you’re saying.”
But Creuzot’s spokeswoman cut in, saying that Creuzot “pointed out that you answered your own question.”
In his interview with The Post, Creuzot defended his confusing email response to Moffeit, claiming that the reporter should have known he would never give him a comment for a story.
“He knows I have nothing to say to him,” Creuzot told The Post.
After Moffeit’s story (“City civil rights leaders demand police reforms”) was published July 26, Creuzot did not initially tell anyone at the paper that he believed that Moffeit had misquoted him about his supposed desire for an oversight agreement.
Why not? He told The Post that he had complained about Moffeit to the paper’s editors in the past and had been ignored.
But in September, editors at the Morning News approached Creuzot, asking whether Moffeit had misquoted him.
“I never contacted them. They contacted me,” Creuzot said. “I don’t know what made them contact me, but they did. And I told them I never made those statements.”
Creuzot said Hardy, who became the Morning News’s executive editor in 2021, was the first editor at the newspaper to listen to his grievances about Moffeit. “She cared,” Creuzot said. In an email to The Post, Hardy said she takes “seriously any concerns brought to my attention.”
Instead of issuing a correction, Morning News bosses took a measure typically reserved for the most serious cases of journalistic malfeasance: On Sept. 27, managing editor Amy Hollyfield published a front-page story under her own byline, headlined “News retracts story after regrettable error.”
What prompted the Morning News to review Moffeit’s story two months after it ran? In an all-staff newsroom meeting held in the wake of Moffeit’s resignation, Hardy claimed that the concern about Moffeit’s relatively low-profile article came from “the community,” where it had been “swirling around apparently for quite some time.”
Hardy insisted that editors were not pressured by officials.
“That narrative that some of you are sharing is wrong,” Hardy said during the meeting, of which an audio recording was obtained and reviewed by The Post.
The paper, meanwhile, had suspended Moffeit with pay on Sept. 11 and commissioned an outside review of his past work. Instead of waiting for the results of the audit, though, Moffeit quit two days later.
This isn’t the first time this year a Morning News journalist has lost their job over their interactions with a city official. In February, the paper fired a reporter after she tweeted the slang term “bruh” at the mayor of Dallas, in response to his critique of local media. The newsroom’s union is taking that case and another reporter’s abrupt firing to arbitration and has filed a grievance over Moffeit’s suspension.
The Morning News’s third-party review of Moffeit’s earlier work is being conducted by Duke University journalism professor Stephen Buckley, a former editor and reporter at The Post and the Tampa Bay Times.
Buckley told The Post that he hasn’t finished his investigation. Still, he agrees with the decision to suspend Moffeit.
“I do think management did the right thing here,” said Buckley, who is not being paid for the investigation.
Moffeit, who has retired from daily journalism and moved out of the state since his September resignation, said Dallas’s conservative culture makes difficult any investigative reporting in the city — even more so when reporters fear that top officials could exert pressure on their editors.
“The culture of fear within the newsroom has been intense,” Moffeit said.
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After Dallas reporter's sudden exit, colleagues allege 'culture of fear' - The Washington Post
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