The News In
Mormon Country
For
more than a century, one newspaper
has been a counterweight to a powerful church.
Will Dean Singleton alter the balance?
Philip McCarthey, ex-owner of The Salt Lake Tribune Tribune, addresses
his former employees on July 30, 2002. ©Paul Fraughton
BY
MICHAEL SCHERER
Brigham
Young, the only American prophet ever to establish a major theocracy
west of the Rockies, still hovers over meetings of the Salt Lake
City Council. His portrait hangs in the back of the room, larger
than life, gazing into the middle distance, his hand on the Book
of Mormon, a globe at his feet.
Almost anywhere else, this symbolic blurring of church and state
might seem exceptional. But in Utah, the line was never clearly
drawn. More than a century after Young founded a new Zion on the
western frontier, the region still functions as a quasi-theocracy.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints still dominates
politics, local media, and culture. It claims membership of roughly
two-thirds of the state’s residents and annual revenues that
have been estimated at $6 billion. It is Utah’s largest employer
and Salt Lake City’s largest landowner. Roughly 90 percent
of the state legislature is Mormon, as are the governor, the House
and Senate delegations, and a majority of the state’s supreme
court and federal judiciary. In addition to Salt Lake’s afternoon
daily, the Deseret News, the church owns the state’s largest
television and news radio station and is buying two more of Salt
Lake’s top five radio stations. Public schools still allow
midday recesses for religious study; some have even banned Monday
night activities in deference to the church’s traditional
time for family worship. Mormons who publicly criticize church
doctrine can still face excommunication, and critical news sources
sometimes run the risk of ecclesiastical sanction.
For 132 years, Utah’s other major daily, The Salt Lake Tribune,
has more or less defined itself against these interests. Far more
than the Deseret News, the Tribune has reported aggressively in
recent years on the political favors that benefited the church,
on the ties between the Mormon church and the Salt Lake Olympic
Organizing Committee, and the church’s controversial conversion
of a piece of Main Street into a religious park. The paper infuriated
church leaders with a three-day series about a frontier massacre
that may have been ordered by Brigham Young. But the newspaper’s
independence is now in question.
Last summer, the Tribune came under new management. On July 30,
one of the newspaper’s ousted owners, Philip McCarthey, stood
on a reporter’s desk in the middle of the newsroom and implored
his soon-to-be former employees to “hang in there a little
longer” as his legal fight to regain control of the paper
continued. “I object like hell to some outsider coming in
here who doesn’t know this community,” he bellowed.
Two days later, William Dean Singleton took over, the beneficiary
of one of the most bitterly fought newsroom takeovers in recent
memory.
One fact made many in the newsroom and community nervous about
Singleton: he had arrived in Utah with the approval of the Mormon
church. While he praised the aggressive reporting done under the
previous owners, he made clear that he does not share the view
that the Tribune has a special mission in specifically challenging
church power. For him, journalism is journalism and he plans to
run the Tribune as he runs his other papers. “We’ve
just ended a long era of the non-Mormons having a newspaper to
compete with the Mormons,” Singleton explained. “The
new era is we are the newspaper for all of Utah.”
So a divided community continues to follow the ownership drama,
a drama that could still oust Singleton any day. He and his editors
are under special scrutiny. More than the fate of a single newspaper
hangs in the balance. “I still get questions everywhere I
go: ‘Have you lost your voice yet?’” says Peggy
Fletcher Stack, the Tribune’s religion writer. “Everyone
is kind of holding their breath.”
Throughout its history,
the Mormon church has wrestled with how to deal with its critics.
Journalists have, at times, been caught up in the struggle. “Journalism
is about questions. Religion is about answers, comfortable answers,”
explains Cal Grondahl, a Mormon editorial cartoonist who once
worked for the Deseret News. “Journalists, we are the bad
news.”
In 1844 dissident Mormons in Illinois created a newspaper called
the Nauvoo Expositor, aiming to expose the polygamy and “political
schemes” of the faith’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith,
who also served as Nauvoo’s mayor. After one printing, Smith
ordered the paper burned and its presses destroyed. The move proved
a fatal mistake. Smith was arrested within days on the order of
the Illinois governor. An anti-Mormon mob promptly murdered him
in jail, spurring the exodus that led Brigham Young to Utah.
Twenty-five years later, Young faced a similar dilemma astride
the salt flats. Though stripped of his title “territorial
governor” by the federal government, Young still directed
the commercial, political, and religious development of the region.
So he took notice when a band of independent Mormons began printing
the Utah Magazine, directly challenging Young’s top-down
economic plan for the region. Young excommunicated the magazine’s
founders, and then banned Mormons from reading the magazine. “They
had imbibed the spirit of apostasy,” Young wrote in the Deseret
News. Their teachings “would destroy Zion, divide the people
asunder, and drive the holy priesthood from the earth.” The
shunned editors closed their magazine, but were not defeated.
They soon founded a new daily newspaper called The Salt Lake Tribune.
Over the next 132 years, relations between the Tribune and the
church-owned Deseret News cycled through stages of recriminations
and tolerance. At its inception in 1871, the Tribune’s owners
promised to “oppose all ecclesiastical interference in civil
or legislative matters.” In practice, this often meant mounting
crass campaigns against the church’s hold on politics and
commerce, while harping incessantly on the practice of polygamy,
the church’s Achilles’ heel. The relationship with the
church so deteriorated that in 1873 the Mormon City Council banned
Tribune reporters from its meetings. Tribune editors responded
by accusing the church-state leadership of “bigotry, fraud,
rancor, and delusion,” and later labeled the Deseret News
“the lying Church organ.” The News, always defending
the church, decried the Tribune’s editors as “dirty-minded
scandal mongers,” “pen-stabbers,” and “defamers
of the dead.”
The war of words tempered considerably when Phil McCarthey’s
great-grandfather, Senator Thomas Kearns, purchased the Tribune
at the turn of the century shortly after his election — a
deft political move given the Tribune’s critical coverage
of his candidacy. Kearns, a Catholic miner enriched by silver,
lead, and zinc, had been elected with the essential blessing of
the church, in line with a now-lapsed tradition of electing one
non-Mormon senator. After one term, however, the church blessing
was revoked, sinking his hope for re-election. A “church
monarchy,” he declared later in his last speech on the Senate
floor, “rules all politics in Utah.” Upon returning
to Utah, he committed his family to the legacy it now struggles
to uphold. “Until there is a complete separation of church
and state, the Tribune will not pass into the hands of any man
or number of men who are not committed to the cause which this
newspaper has so long espoused,” he wrote in the Tribune.
The years that followed, however, were ones of relative harmony,
largely free of anti-Mormon crusades. A new relationship was formalized
in 1952, more than thirty years after Kearns’s death, in
what later became known as “The Great Accommodation.”
Approached by the church president while recovering from a heart
attack, the Tribune’s publisher, John Fitzpatrick, agreed
to merge his printing, advertising, and circulation departments
with those of the church-owned Deseret News. Two decades before
the Newspaper Preservation Act, the two papers formed a nascent
joint operating agreement (JOA), with the Tribune published in
the morning, the Deseret News in the afternoon. “Without
that, the Deseret News would have gone down the drain,” says
Jack Gallivan, who is the eighty-seven-year-old adopted son of
Senator Kearns’s widow, and who followed Fitzpatrick as publisher.
The same might have been said about the Tribune, which, like its
new partner, was reeling from a costly and fruitless circulation
campaign.
Under Fitzpatrick’s and Gallivan’s leadership, the Tribune
no longer relentlessly focused on mitigating the church’s
power. Gallivan, like Fitzpatrick before him, counted church leaders
as personal friends. He used the newspaper for the common good,
aiming editorials at such things as making tourism Utah’s
largest industry, rebuilding the commercial heart of downtown
Salt Lake — a portion of which is named the Gallivan Center
— and beginning the process that eventually led to Salt Lake’s
hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Those friendships are now in tatters, the victim of a legal fight
Gallivan considers the worst experience of his life. “My
mission in life is maintaining control and ownership in that newspaper”
for Senator Kearns’s descendants, Gallivan said over a gin
martini in downtown Salt Lake. “If I fail, then my life’s
effort is a failure.”
By his heritage and his
hobbies, Phil McCarthey, the heir to Senator Kearns’s legacy,
is decidedly not a Mormon. In a city that regularly dispatches
thousands of missionary men in black suits and ties, he wears
a ruby-colored sport coat and Prada shoes. He keeps his office
stocked with Jameson and Cutty Sark, shoots craps in Vegas, and
savors the occasional fine cigar. But now he is on a mission of
his own, and his zeal is palpable.
Over French toast and coffee in a Salt Lake diner in December,
McCarthey described the forces that define newspapering in Utah.
He placed three creamer cups on the table. “In Utah, two-thirds
of the people are LDS and one-third is non-LDS,” he explained,
grouping two cups together, leaving the non-Mormon third alone.
“What it should tell you is that one-third should take The
Salt Lake Tribune and two-thirds would take the Deseret News.”
But the reality, he pointed out, is closer to the reverse. Among
newspaper readers in Salt Lake, the middle creamer cup switched
sides long ago. The Tribune outstrips the News’s circulation
roughly two to one, attracting a readership that is roughly 50
percent Mormon. The Deseret News points out that this disparity
can be tied in part to its afternoon delivery, since afternoon
papers everywhere are shrinking. But many in town, both Mormon
and non-Mormon, cite the church paper’s other problem —
credibility. A 2002 poll by Brigham Young University found that
70 percent of Utah voters thought the Deseret News slanted its
coverage to favor the church. By contrast, 36 percent — a
single creamer cup — ranked the Tribune as biased against
the Mormon faith.
Singleton’s arrival was a clear victory for the church, ending
a half-decade of deteriorating relations between the two JOA partners.
According to internal News documents, the church did not want
the McCartheys to retain control of the Tribune. When Singleton
took the helm, the church received a promise of close business
cooperation for the News’s planned switch to morning publication
beginning March 31, 2003, an agreement that the McCartheys could
never reach with the church. And News editor John Hughes, who
won a Pulitzer at The Christian Science Monitor, also sees an
opportunity with the move to redefine the editorial approach of
the News, which will be rechristened as the Deseret Morning News.
He no longer wants the paper to be a mouthpiece for the church
or a newspaper for one group of people. As a result, editorials
are no longer sent to church headquarters for approval, and Hughes
says he has stepped up a campaign against the “self-censorship”
of reporters and editors that he admits still occasionally creeps
into News reporting. “I want it to be a newspaper for the
entire community, all races, all religions,” Hughes explains,
echoing Singleton.
But the tangled tale of legal and political intrigue that preceded
Singleton’s takeover seems to complicate those claims. The
church had tried in private negotiations for years to take control
of the Tribune itself — a fact glossed over in the Deseret
News’s reporting on the issue — and News managers had
not hesitated to exert the power of their owners in the struggle.
These facts were hardly lost on Phil McCarthey and his lawyers,
who have argued in court for two years that Singleton’s arrival
amounted to nothing less than snuffing out an independent voice.
Like Singleton, McCarthey casts himself as a uniter, not a divider.
But McCarthey’s family is too steeped in Utah history to
pretend to neutrality. “I feel that non-Mormons have abdicated
too much of our legislative process,” McCarthey says. “Whether
it’s the Tribune or our families, we need to ally ourselves
to get more balance.” McCarthey’s history — both
his brother and his father worked at the Tribune — also fuels
his crusade. He speaks openly about retribution against those
who took away his paper, and he compares himself to Churchill
in 1940, an analogy that posits Singleton as the leader of the
Third Reich, offering false promises of peace on the path to global
domination. (At one point, Singleton offered to sell back 49 percent
of the paper to the family, if it would drop any legal claims.)
“Can you imagine the world today had Churchill taken some
kind of a deal?” he asks rhetorically. “The darkness
that would have descended over the earth.”
McCarthey will fight to the end. Presently, that fight has landed
in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver, where a ruling expected
any day could force Singleton to resell the paper to McCarthey,
or forever dash McCarthey’s hopes at regaining control. His
family has so far spent $11 million on its quest, without blinking.
No one could have foreseen
the events that ended family control of the Tribune. The paper
trail is too doused in personal acrimony, too tangled by legal
maneuverings, and too littered with false starts, disputed contracts,
and political intrigue. But its beginning is clear: in 1997 Gallivan
arranged what he thought was the temporary transfer of Tribune
ownership to a cable company he helped found. At that time, the
descendants of Senator Kearns owned the majority of shares in
the Tribune, several smaller newspapers, and Tele-Communications
Inc., a burgeoning cable giant. Gallivan arranged to exchange
the newspapers and cable ownership for roughly $731 million in
TCI common stock, enriching the family and many Tribune employees.
But the deal was not clear-cut when it came to The Salt Lake Tribune.
On the insistence of the McCarthey family, one branch of Senator
Kearns’s heirs, the deal specifically allowed for editorial
control of the newspaper to remain with the family for five years.
After that period, which allowed the heirs to avoid estate tax
penalties, they had the exclusive right to repurchase the paper
at market value. For the participants at the time, the deal seemed
ironclad.
But a series of events soon scuttled it. With the ink still drying
on the agreement, TCI’s president, Leo Hindery, began shopping
the paper around. He saw it as a political liability in Utah,
an institution that clashed with the politically powerful Mormon
church. This concern increased in 1999, when TCI merged into AT&T,
with its cable and wireless operations, dramatically increasing
the company’s regulatory concerns. “There have recently
been serious threats to AT&T’s political interests in
the state related to our ownership of The Salt Lake Tribune,”
Hindery wrote to a colleague in 1999. He proposed selling the
Tribune to the Deseret News, noting that among the benefits was
“the good will we will have preserved with the Mormon Church
and the political leadership of the State.”
For the Deseret News, Hindery’s offer came as church leaders
and News managers found their business and editorial relationship
with the Tribune deteriorating. For one thing, church executives
believed that the McCarthey family’s upper hand in the JOA
threatened the financial future of the News. “We felt we
had to go to morning delivery,” News chairman Glen Snarr
explains. “Evening papers were collapsing all around us.”
But under the JOA, the News could go morning only if it paid for
the costs of the change. The two papers fiercely debated the meaning
of this clause. Tribune management, which controlled the JOA,
suggested that the church would have to pay for a new press as
well as millions more in advertising revenue lost if the two papers
went head to head. The two papers accused each other of negotiating
in bad faith.
So with Hindery’s proposal, the church jumped at the chance
to own its rival. “If the church wants to strengthen its
voice, this may be the opportunity we have been looking for,”
Snarr wrote at the time. News executives proposed a number of
different ways to take over the paper. They could merge the newsrooms,
spin off the Tribune newsroom to new owners, or even allow local
university leaders to run the paper. In one memo, News editor
Hughes went so far as to propose firing the Tribune columnist
Robert Kirby, whose “Johnny-one-note stuff is Mormon-bashing,”
while rehiring other columnists. “But clean them up,”
wrote Hughes.
Eventually, however, the church decided against directly owning
the Tribune’s editorial voice, noting the potential public
backlash. They offered the McCartheys a deal, in which the family
would keep control of the Tribune newsroom, while giving the church
indirect control over both newsroom budget and the JOA. The family
turned it down, and the church decided to try to buy the Tribune
outright. The church then exerted its political muscle. Church
representatives asked Senator Orrin Hatch, the Mormon chairman
of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, to assure Michael
Armstrong, the chairman of AT&T, that the federal government
would not have antitrust concerns over the purchase. (Since then
Hatch has been at the center of an antitrust battle over AT&T’s
purchase of Comcast. According to campaign finance reports, AT&T
is Hatch’s fifth-largest donor.) Armstrong also spoke with
Governor Michael Leavitt of Utah about the potential purchase.
In the end, however, the deal fell through. At an AT&T board
meeting in 1999, John Malone, the former head of TCI who had drafted
the 1997 deal with Gallivan, spoke out against a sale to the church.
“It was poor policy for AT&T to seek ways around the
intent of the agreement,” Malone later explained.
With its plan undermined, the Deseret News first increased its
legal threats against AT&T, threatening to sue the telecom
giant for at least $142 million. The News also argued that the
McCarthey family option to repurchase the Tribune after five years
was effectively irrelevant, since a clause in the JOA requires
Deseret News approval for any transfer of stock in the joint company.
In essence, the Mormon church claimed the right to veto any future
owners of the Tribune, including its former business partners,
the McCarthey family. The merits of these claims are now on appeal
in federal court. Meanwhile, under increasing pressure because
of legal complications from a newspaper it never wanted, AT&T
eventually decided that selling the paper back to the McCarthey
family ran too great a legal and political risk.
Dean Singleton entered from the sidelines, smoothly courting both
the church’s representatives at the News and AT&T executives.
Singleton had been following the bitter battle for years. On December
1, 2000, Michael Huseby, an AT&T executive charged with arranging
the sale of the Tribune, showed up at the Tribune building to
announce to McCarthey and the staff that he had just sold the
paper to Singleton. The Deseret News dropped its legal claims
against AT&T. Singleton got a bargain, paying $200 million.
Two years later appraisers for the court would determine the paper
to be worth $360 million (though McCarthey has since challenged
this figure as too high). Soon after the sale, the McCarthey family
filed its lawsuit. The challenge for journalists at both the Tribune
and the News began.
For months before the lawsuit,
rumors of a potential attempt by the church to purchase the Tribune
had swirled through Salt Lake City. The story was whispered in
boardrooms and at dinner parties, but for three years the bombshell
never breached the pages of either newspaper. The Tribune’s
editor, Jay Shelledy, knew about the negotiations from his boss,
publisher Dominic Welch. He said he felt hamstrung, however, since
he had been told the information in confidence. “We certainly
didn’t want the stuff to get out in the paper until we had
a resolution,” explained Welch. The Tribune’s reporters
had a different idea.
“I was just flabbergasted that this was going on and we weren’t
reporting it,” says Christopher Smith, the Tribune’s
current Washington correspondent. He was not alone. In early October,
Smith was one of about fifty reporters and editors who signed
a petition to Welch, urging the Tribune to break its silence.
Unwilling to wait, someone in the newsroom leaked the news to
a local television station, which reported live that night from
outside the Tribune building. “We came out the next morning
with it,” says Shelledy. The headline: TRIBUNE SEEKS TO KEEP
PAPER FROM D-NEWS.
Thus began a two-year struggle for both the Tribune and the Deseret
News — to cover an explosive battle that affected everyone
in both newsrooms. Though Singleton agreed to purchase the paper
in 2000, he would not take control of the newsroom until August
2002, leaving the McCartheys at the helm for much of the reporting.
Both papers stumbled and shined at times, but down the stretch
the Tribune came out ahead, living up to its name as the more
independent of the two newspapers. When the Tribune’s newsroom
filed a motion to unseal all documents in the court case, the
Deseret News declined to join. So, too, did the local chapter
of the Society of Professional Journalists, swayed in part by
two News appointees and one from the church-sponsored Brigham
Young University. “I don’t think we would join in a
suit to unseal our own documents,” explained the News’s
Hughes, who directed both the paper’s editorials and its
news coverage. Such blending of editorial and business obligations
appears to have had an impact on much of the Deseret News coverage
of the case. Even after the internal memos were released, the
paper still never reported in detail the early discussions by
the Deseret News to purchase the Tribune outright or merge the
newsrooms. Instead, the paper ran a front-page story that said,
“The management of the News has never sought to control the
editorial voice of the Tribune,” a narrow, misleading interpretation
of the facts. “It was oversimplified,” says Angie Welling,
a Deseret News reporter, who shared a byline on the story. “I
don’t think from day one the Deseret News has been as aggressive
as the Tribune.” But at the same time, she complains that
the Tribune too often reported on the lawsuit as less of a business
dispute between newspapers than a story about the church.
At the Tribune, the pressure on reporters was enormous, says Sheila
McCann, who edited the majority of the stories. “We were
in an impossible situation,” she says. At first, McCann and
some reporters had proposed bringing in an outside writer to do
stories on the conflict, but Shelledy disagreed. “To a big
degree, I still wish we would have,” McCann said. To make
matters more difficult, the Tribune’s editorial page became
more and more strident as the ownership grappled with the possibility
of a Singleton takeover. One editorial pleaded with readers to
contact the U.S. Department of Justice to protest the takeover.
Another quoted Singleton threatening Tribune management: “You
will not win against me and the Deseret News with a Mormon judge.”
Welch confirms the quote. Singleton says it is a fabrication,
calling McCarthey and his managers “nasty, irrational people
who will say anything.” (The presiding federal judge, who
served as an aide to Governor Leavitt and was appointed at the
behest of Senator Hatch, has so far refused to recuse himself.)
A Tribune columnist, Robert
Kirby, read that editorial with dismay. A former cop, Kirby started
in journalism with a humor column about why cops hate dealing
with the public, employing an acute talent for lampooning sensitive
issues and bridging social divides. Now, at the Tribune, he has
focused his pen on bridging the state’s festering religious
divide, alternately making fun of Mormon orthodoxy and the non-Mormon
backlash it creates. The nasty e-mail comes from both groups,
and he holds no hard feelings over Hughes’s branding him
a “Johnny-one-note.”
But Kirby is also a devout Mormon, one of a few in the Tribune
newsroom, making him sensitive to accusations that Mormons cannot
be reliable observers of their own church. If his beliefs make
him biased, he reasons, then the bias of non-Mormons is just as
strong. “Among believing Mormons, we have this attitude where
at some point you have to step back and treat the church as you
would any other major corporation. There are things that the church
is not going to like us to do, but we have an obligation to do
them anyway,” said Kirby, speaking from beneath a graying
walrus mustache. “It’s very similar to being a policeman
and pulling over one of your best friends. Do I still have to
do my job? The answer is, yes, you do.”
That doesn’t mean Mormons don’t have other responsibilities
to consider. Twice Kirby’s local church leaders have called
him in for a meeting because of columns he has written. Once he
joked that the ninety-two-year-old church president, Gordon B.
Hinckley, did not scare him, since Kirby would probably win in
a fist fight. The second time he ruminated about attending church
in the nude. Both times he agreed to be more respectful, conceding
that it was not his role to mock sacred ordinances or question
the performance of church leaders. But all other subjects, he
insists, are fair game. When a church leader asked him to tone
down his use of racy language in his columns, his answer was swift.
“I said no, because that is my yard,” Kirby said.
Such delicate concerns, and the peculiar historical role of the
Tribune, distinguish journalism in Utah. There are some signs
that Singleton is learning the ropes. When he visited the paper
in July, he lambasted an editorial cartoon by the Tribune’s
Pat Bagley that lampooned — in typical Tribune fashion —
Deseret News readers. It portrayed non-Mormon readers of a new
morning Deseret News spitting out the coffee, an oblique reference
to the Mormon prohibition of certain caffeinated drinks.
“You won’t see cartoons like yesterday’s,”
Singleton told the Tribune staff when asked about any changes
he would make. “We will treat our partners with respect.”
Bagley, whose biting wit often ruffles the feathers of church
leaders, thought that his job might be on the line. “So I
asked him to clarify,” Bagley says. “And he did a hundred-eighty-degree
turn. I have free rein as long as I stay away from the lawsuit.”
So far, Singleton has been living up to his word, investing resources
in the paper, dissolving most of the immediate fears that greeted
his arrival. He filled seven newsroom positions, reopened a Washington,
D.C., bureau, doled out nearly $200,000 in raises, and kept on
the Tribune’s editor under the McCartheys, Jay Shelledy,
who has long needled the church with critical stories. Singleton
also promoted Vern Anderson, a veteran Associated Press editor,
to editorial-page editor, installing someone known for his aggressive
coverage of the church with political views that are in many cases
more liberal than McCarthey’s editorial page.
Nonetheless, some reporters are still concerned that another shoe
might drop. “We are all wondering, Is Jay still going to
be here when the case is resolved?” says one reporter, echoing
the sentiments of several others. “Some of us think Singleton
is just putting on a good show right now for the court.”
To date, Shelledy says that Singleton has attempted to kill only
one story — unsuccessfully. The story concerned a Republican
state senate candidate accused just days before the election of
using racial epithets. Singleton, who received a call from the
senator, said the timing smacked of dirty politics. Shelledy,
who says he has been promised editorial autonomy, overruled him.
“He has done what he said he would so far,” Shelledy
says. “My belief is that you trust people until it comes
to a point you shouldn’t.”
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Michael
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