In a hit piece published on Monday about Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz's involvement in the release of Americans held captive abroad, The Dallas Morning News sought comment from a supposedly independent, impartial source to evaluate Cruz's efforts on behalf of Americans both in public and behind the scenes.
The Dallas Morning News apparently found Jeremi Suri — someone described in the piece as "a professor of history and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on contemporary politics and foreign policy." The article then quotes Suri as saying "Cruz hasn't exactly made a habit of abiding by guidance from the executive branch [dealing with Americans in captivity] — especially during Biden's presidency."
Later in the piece, The Dallas Morning News adds that "Suri said Cruz might be overblowing his role in U.S.-Russia relations. 'He is not held in a special category by Russian diplomats, I can tell you that as a fact,' Suri said."
So, this expect on foreign policy and contemporary politics, as The Dallas Morning News qualified his commentary, doesn't think highly of Senator Cruz. Tough crowd? That's not even the half of it.
As it turns out, Suri is actually a frequent and vocal public critic of Cruz, a fact that was conveniently omitted from the story when it ran at 5:30 Monday morning.
Going back as far as 2018, Suri was tweeting in support of Vanity Fair cover model Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke and tagging at least one post with "#CruzSucks," part of what subsequent tweets reveal to be something of a personal vendetta against Cruz.
This destroys Ted Cruz. Please circulate widely! #Beto #cruzsucks https://t.co/GyrP7gD8GM
— Jeremi Suri (@JeremiSuri) October 10, 2018
In January 2021, Suri tweeted that it's "time to resign" for "Cruz, Hawley, & other scumbags."
Former House Republican leader Cantor calls out ?@tedcruz? for promoting lies, conspiracy, and insurrection. Republicans must condemn their own who are undermining our democracy and lying to the public. Time to resign Cruz, Hawley, & other scumbags. https://t.co/nDAmGEXTao
— Jeremi Suri (@JeremiSuri) January 29, 2021
Suri repeated his call for Cruz to resign a month later, and in March 2022 called the senator "a menace to democracy."
Ted Cruz consistently condemns people for exactly what he does, even worse. #ResignTedCruz https://t.co/qJVCMmMCtT
— Jeremi Suri (@JeremiSuri) February 18, 2021
Ted Cruz conspired to overturn the 2020 election. He is a menace to democracy. @tedcruz #worstsenator https://t.co/stVqncr1t1
— Jeremi Suri (@JeremiSuri) March 28, 2022
As his tweets reveal, Suri is anything but an impartial source to be called upon for his "expert" opinion about Senator Cruz. That's something the Dallas Morning News apparently admitted, not in so many words, when the story was quietly updated at 3:35pm to add some significant caveats to Suri's commentary.
The Dallas Morning News changed: "But, Suri said, Cruz hasn't exactly made a habit out of abiding by guidance from the executive branch..." to: "But, as Suri sees it..." The story was also updated to change: "Suri said Cruz might be overblowing his role in U.S.-Russia relations" to: "Suri, who has overtly criticized Cruz on social media, said the senator..." (emphasis added).
What's even more peculiar is that, at the time of writing, the only sort of editorial note on the piece states that "This story was updated at 3:45 p.m. with more of Cruz's comments." But the story displays a last-updated time of 3:35pm and the significant changes to how Suri's commentary was qualified are left unmentioned.
While it's impossible to know the intentions of the piece's author or if this was simply an oversight due to incomplete vetting of a source, the fact that the changes were made without a note calls into question whether it was an innocent mistake or yet another case of confirmation bias within the mainstream media-liberal commentary feedback loop. It's the same thing seen in the fact checks carried out by PolitiFact and others: find a conservative saying something inconvenient to the favored liberal narrative, decide to check their assertion, interview liberal sources who will reliably cast doubt on what the conservative says, and voila — there's an "independent" fact check with quotes from "experts" that prove the conservative was wrong.
It's a book-cooking formula that's been perfected by the mainstream media's activist writers who, unlike conservative writers, pretend to exist above and outside of the political tides. It's lunacy to believe those on the left who deny the existence of absolute truth are actually arbiters of objective truth. But they carry on, and the resulting biased coverage and fact checks are what's now found in PolitiFact and, seemingly, The Dallas Morning News.
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