“I Am an ‘Enemy of the People’”

Jim Moroney, recently retired publisher of The Dallas Morning News, will give the nineteenth annual Rosine Smith Sammons Lecture in Media Ethics at SMU at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, October 2. The lecture, titled “I Am an ‘Enemy of the People,’” will be held in Caruth Auditorium in the Owen Arts Center, 6101 Bishop Blvd. on the SMU campus (Dallas 75205). The event is free and tickets are not required. Arts center parking information is available here. Additional parking will be available that evening on Bishop Blvd. For more information, call 214-768-2787. The Sammons Lecture Series is presented by the Division of Journalism at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts.

Moroney has served as the chairman, president and CEO of A. H. Belo Corporation. He served as publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News from June 2001 to March 2018.

He began his career with Belo as a sales trainee at WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth. In 1985 he became local sales manager for WFAA and later that year was promoted to general sales manager of KOTV in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He returned to Dallas in 1989 as Belo’s controller. Moroney was promoted to president and general manager of KOTV in Tulsa in January 1993. In November 1993 he became a vice president of the Broadcast division. In January 1997, Moroney was promoted to president/Television Group, assuming responsibility for the operating of all of Belo’s television stations in 15 markets across the U.S. In June 1998, he was named executive vice president of Belo, with responsibility for finance, treasury and investor relations. Moroney served as president of Belo Interactive, Inc. from its formation in May 1999 until June 2001.

Moroney has served on the board of the Television Bureau of Advertising and numerous civic organizations. He presently serves on the boards of The Associated Press, the News Media Alliance and the State Fair of Texas, the advisory board of the College of Communications at The University of Texas, the Bishop’s Finance Council of the Diocese of Dallas, and is chair of the Board of Governors of The Dallas Foundation.

In April 2004, Editor & Publisher selected Moroney as Publisher of the Year for his accomplishments at The Dallas Morning News. In 2012, he served as chairman of the Newspaper Association of America, the industry’s trade association (now named News Media Alliance). That year he also received the Frank W. Mayborn Award from The Texas Daily Newspaper Association for Community Leadership. In 2016, he received the Frank W. Mayborn Leadership Award from the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, and the following year he received the James Madison Award from the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

Moroney graduated from Stanford University in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in American studies, and earned an M.B.A. in 1983 from The University of Texas at Austin.

The Rosine Smith Sammons Lecture Series in Media Ethics is funded by a generous endowment from the Rosine Foundation Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas, at the recommendation of Mary Anne Sammons Cree of Dallas. The series is named in honor of her mother, Rosine Smith Sammons, who graduated from SMU in the 1920s with a degree in journalism. The endowment will provide permanent resources for the Meadows School of the Arts to present annual lectures focusing on media ethics. Past speakers have included Pulitzer-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer, national media lawyer and author Bruce Sanford, and Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez.

The Division of Journalism, under The Belo Foundation Distinguished Chair Tony Pederson, offers concentrations in all media – broadcast, print and internet – through its convergence journalism program. With the help of a gift from The Belo Foundation, the Division has become one of the few journalism schools in the country to provide hands-on experience through a new digital newsroom, television studio and website.