Nope. Texas Newspapers. Just Nope.

The big news around the Dallas, Texas area these days apparently is that Senator Ted Cruz’s teenage daughter does not agree with her father’s politics.

Stop the Presses!

A teenager disagrees with her father! Tear up the front page! Give me six columns above the fold! This is big!

Seriously? That’s all you got there in Dallas?

This is a textbook example of how not to commit journalism.

At the Dallas Observer, editors apparently looked up the word “journalism” in the dictionary and read: “stalking a teenager’s social media is a good way to get story ideas.”

Upon reading that, an editor apparently assigned a reporter to stalk Senator Ted Cruz’s teenage daughter Caroline’s TikTok and see if she could come up with anything interesting.

Tacked onto the end of a story about an interview Sen. Cruz gave to a 15-year-old reporter at a conservative Alabama news service, The Observer lets us in on a “surprising tidbit” about the Senator’s daughter.

“A lot of people judge me based upon him at first glance…but I really disagree with most of his views,” The Observer quoted Caroline as saying.

That’s it. That’s the news. A teenager disagrees with her father.

So this is how it went in Dallas. See if you can keep all this straight.

Senator Ted Cruz gives a wholly unremarkable interview to a 15-year-old at an Alabama conservative news service and says he’d love to run for president again.

Well, there’s a scoop for you. A senator who previously lost his bid for the presidency would like to try again.

Since The Observer can only tease out about five paragraphs on this story (including the obligatory Twitter reactions), they need to flesh it out with something more. So they tack on the wholly unnecessary reporting about his daughter’s TikTok.

Facing the end of the year with little real news, The Dallas Morning News finds The Observer’s story and decides to run it, but takes out the part about the senator and his presidential ambitions and only runs the part about Caroline’s TikTok, without adding anything new.

Now, it’s not unusual for newspapers to run with stories originally reported by another news outlet – even the competition. But what is customary is for the newspaper to add something new to the story they originally lifted from another outlet. They’ll add original quotes, or find another source to confirm what was written.

Running someone else’s story with no additional reporting is frowned upon. It’s also lazy journalism.

And news outlets should not be in the business of writing about a politician’s minor children. Particularly if there is no real news there. They shouldn't be in the business of stalking a teenager’s social media. And they shouldn’t be surprised that a teenager disagrees with her father.

This is not news. It’s also not journalism.

The editor who thought it was a good idea to assign a reporter to monitor a teenager’s TikTok account and report on what she found should be fired. The reporter should have refused to do the story.

Even if the reporter innocently “stumbled” upon Caroline’s video on TikTok and presented the story to her editor, the editor should have not approved it.

There is no good reason to run this story. It’s not news.

What’s next? Caroline eats chocolate! She likes puppies!

Sheesh!