DMN vs. UT Southwestern: This Time It’s More Personal Than the Last Time When It Was Personal

It’s strange. Normally to see a fight like this, you’ve got to go out to a sports bar or pony up $60 to order the pay-per-view at home. But the Dallas Morning News and UT Southwestern are giving us this one for free. If you haven’t been following along, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up: the paper has been dogging Parkland and UT Southwestern over billing practices, a federal investigation, and, most recently, how much the paper should have to pay for open records requests. This past Sunday, the paper published two unflattering stories about patient care at Parkland. The stories further raised the hackles of Daniel Podolsky, the president of UT Southwestern Medical Center. He wrote an impassioned letter to the editor that is making the rounds and which I share below. You can read the entire thing, but here’s the crux of it:

In an effort to uncover problems — and with a strikingly absent concern for context — Dallas Morning News reporters have been publicly seeking via their blog to hear from Parkland patients who experienced complications in their care. If the reporters were to ask the opposite question, I have no doubt that they would have been inundated with stories from grateful patients whose lives were saved and transformed by the care they received at Parkland from UT Southwestern faculty working with trainees and students. The Dallas Morning News is not delivering to the people of Dallas the quality of journalism they deserve by looking for exceptions and using them to cast aspersions on the overriding quality of medical care available at Parkland from UT Southwestern attending and resident physicians and all other Parkland employees.

Right now, there are people over at DISD who are saying, “Amen!”

Listen, the paper is doing its job. But it’s only doing half of its job. Podolsky is right. With a huge organization like Parkland, if you go looking for horrific, ugly stories, you’ll find them. If you file enough open records requests, you’ll find something nasty to write about. And you should write about it. That’s how a good newspaper with a strong investigative team fulfills its mission.

But that’s only part of the mission. Because if you treat large public institutions like Parkland and DISD as only an investigative beat, your hard-working investigators will, as a matter of course, make those institutions look corrupt and incompetent. So in addition to doing the necessary investigative work, you also have to explain to your readers what’s really happening on a larger scale. That’s the context Podolsky is talking about. Giving context, though, that’s not as sexy as telling stories about operations gone awry.

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