Update February 1, 2023: Representatives of the Fort Worth NewsGuild (the union which represents many Fort Worth Star-Telegram staff reporters) stated that they previously requested information from McClatchy, the paper’s parent company, about how four conservative columnists, including the subject of this article, were chosen for their roles. Their request was denied. According to a statement shared on the union’s Twitter account in response to this article, the guild stands “firmly against hateful rhetoric and misinformation in all its forms—including when it appears in any of the pages of our newspaper.”
“As journalists, we are expected to deliver fair, accurate content. We call on McClatchy and Fort Worth Star-Telegram management to apply the same standards of accuracy and ethics to columnists as are applied to newsroom employees,” the statement concludes.
Last year, Carlos Turcios regularly wrote columns for the Fort Worth Star Telegram that criticized Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) while simultaneously working for a PAC that opposed so-called “critical race theory” and called for organizing protests against FWISD policies—facts that were rarely disclosed in his essays.
