by James W. Ure
Terry Orme, relieved to be back in his editor's role after Paul Huntsman became publisher, and George Pyle, the paper's liberal-leaning editorial writer, were talking at a garden party celebrating Huntsman's purchase of the paper three months earlier. The previous weekend had seen the mass shooting of gays at a nightclub in Orlando. During a Monday phone conference with Paul Huntsman, they presented the thrust of the next day's lead editorial: Pyle wanted to write a condemnation of the sale of automatic military weapons. There was a pause on the other end of the line. Said Huntsman, “Do you know you are talking to a man whose father-in-law gave him an AK-47 as a wedding gift?”58
Orme and Pyle braced. Would he shut down the editorial? On the contrary, he gave his blessing to a blistering piece urging a ban on the sale of military-grade automatic weapons.59
On Facebook's “Save the Tribune” pages Paul Huntsman wrote, “We hope to ensure the Tribune's independent voice for future generations and are thrilled to own a business of this quality and stature.”60
Questions flew fast and furious. Was Paul Huntsman really interested in running the Tribune? Was Paul tapped to carry out his father's desire to own a newspaper? Jon Huntsman Sr. had always wanted a newspaper. He tried to buy the Deseret News years before.61
Would Paul Huntsman be a civic-minded, highly visual community leader like Jack Gallivan? Or would he become a hands-off publisher? Or somewhere in between?
Some Tribune staffers speculated that Paul Huntsman wanted to see reform within the LDS Church. His ownership of the Tribune could be influential. “He really believes that the Trib should be a counterbalance—and that's a tricky needle to thread,” said another staff writer who wished to remain anonymous.62
Paul Huntsman underlined this in a statement: “We can assure you that the Tribune will never abandon its purpose as a watchdog over Utah's institutions of power; its positioning as a platform for vivid storytelling and its reputation as a voice for all Utahns.”63
A note of dissonance was struck on July 29, 2016. Terry Orme resigned. He had been at the Tribune for thirty-nine years and had helmed the paper during its darkest times under Alden's ownership. He was “a reporter's editor,” said Tribune columnist Paul Rolly.64 Terry had a good reputation and was well liked by those who worked with him.
In July 2016, Orme had been called to Paul Huntsman's office. Winding down a discussion on possible political endorsements, Huntsman said he wanted to bring back Jennifer Napier-Pearce, a multimedia specialist who had recently left the Tribune to join the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics. Orme told Huntsman he wasn't sure Napier-Pearce would come back.65
Then Huntsman told him he wanted to bring Napier-Pearce back to replace Terry as editor. He added that Terry could have “any position at the paper he wanted.”66
Orme was stunned. He'd expected, as promised when Huntsman bought the paper, to stay on as editor. “I was out. That's what happens in business,” said Orme. “On reflection, I'd been there for thirty-nine years. It's healthy for the institution and for me. It's sort of necessary, really. And it's karmic. I laid off a lot of people as Alden and Digital kept insisting on cutbacks. For me to shed tears would be selfish. The irony is that under Alden I thrived and had a lot of fun. Then along comes the local billionaire who everyone wanted to own the paper, and I'm out the door.”67 It was a decision that many lamented.
“Terry's departure ruined our happy ending,” said Joan O'Brien of Citizens for Two Voices.68
Some Tribune staff threatened to quit in sympathy with Orme, but Orme cooled the idea. “It wasn't handled well,” said a former Tribune staffer who has an inside track at the newspaper.69
Orme's replacement, Jennifer Napier-Pearce, was a multimedia maven with a master's degree from Stanford who had worked at the Tribune as well as for the local NPR station, KUER. According to Jay Shelledy, Napier-Pearce had not “intrigued for the job and was surprised when Paul Huntsman offered it.”70 Napier-Pearce's public statement on taking the editorship was, “This is such a tremendous honor to rejoin an institution that I love with all my heart…. I owe a debt to Terry [Orme] and think he is the consummate professional and mentor.”71
Napier-Pearce was qualified to lead the Tribune into the digital frenzy. She was well liked and respected by local journalists. She took her place as editor on August 22, 2016, at a staff meeting at which both Paul Huntsman and his father spoke. The concern of some was that she had little experience as an editor, but on November 23, 2016, Matt Canham, a veteran staff writer, was named senior managing editor and would oversee day-to-day newsroom operations.72
Canham was charged with overseeing newsroom operations and content standards that will allow other editors to focus on cross-team investigative coverage and special projects.73 She would also have the benefit of Tim Fitzpatrick's many years at the Tribune. He is the grandson of John F. Fitzpatrick and is executive vice president.
One of the immediate tasks of Huntsman and Napier-Pearce was to oversee improvements to the Tribune's dreadful website, which was begun in 1996. In 2008, when Dean Singleton still controlled both the Tribune and the JOA, he established a Tribune-owned company called Utah Digital Services (UDS) to handle the website. Content was provided by the Tribune staff. However, Singleton turned the UDS operation over to the JOA's advertising people so as to maximize profits from combination web and print buys. After Clark Gilbert assumed JOA control in 2013, UDS answered to Ad Taxi, the digital ad sales company of MediaNews Group/Digital First Media, who were wringing every penny out of the paper and giving lip service to the website. The Tribune staff had to provide content while being helpless as to the look, feel, and operation of its own website.74
In the 2016 deal, Huntsman acquired control of UDS. “We are rebuilding the website from the ground up,” said Napier-Pearce. “We are using Arc Publishing tools from [Jeff] Bezos's Washington Post, and we've signed a local firm to do the design work. Additionally, we are going to have a new app that brings more personalization to the reader, and, eventually, perhaps a suite of apps.”75
One initially voiced concern was that Napier-Pearce was an active Mormon, and the nuances of Mormon dealings can be reported in so many different ways.
To that Napier-Pearce responded, “I trust our reporters to do their jobs—to hold those in power responsible, be it the LDS Church, Rocky Mountain Power [Utah's electricity provider], or government. The Tribune's mission has not changed. I'm not pushing any personal agenda, and I want my reporters to do their jobs.”76
On October, 3, 2016, the Tribune's front-page headline read, “Leaked LDS Videos Cause Stir.” The lengthy story helped allay concerns that the new owner and editor would give the church deferential treatment, although the story was not exclusively the Tribune's. The story told how fifteen secret videos shot from 2007 to 2012 showed high-level LDS Church leaders privately talking about hot-button issues. In the videos the leaders discuss espionage-convicted soldier Chelsea Manning's sexuality and increased proselytizing opportunities among Muslims since the US invasion of the Middle East.77 “They discussed issues ranging from politics to pot, the ‘homosexual agenda’ to the housing crisis, marriage to morality, Muslims to Kurds,” the Tribune reported.78
Napier-Pearce had gone big on the story, signaling an independent future for the Tribune.
In the autumn of 2016 the newspaper editorialized in favor of Hillary Clinton for president; for US senator Mike Lee, a conservative Republican; for US congresswoman Mia Love, a conservative Republican, for US congressman Chris Stewart (brother to Judge Ted Stewart), a conservative Republican. Confounding this was the endorsement of a Democrat, Steven Tryon, who faced off against congressional gadfly, Republican Jason Chaffetz. (All incumbents were reelected, including Chaffetz.)79
The endorsements were loaded with as many criticisms as plaudits; each had the feel of editorial writers holding their noses. This was Paul Huntsman's bailiwick, so the endorsements must be his responsibility.
Four months
into her editorship, Napier-Pearce said, “There is a true sense of optimism on the staff. Paul [Huntsman] is a great guy, a great boss, and interested in what we are doing, but he is not a micromanager. He lets us do our job. There's not a reporter on staff who's had anything but encouragement from Paul.” As for Jon Huntsman Sr., who has visited the newsroom twice since Napier-Pearce came on board, “He's our greatest cheerleader. Paul has inherited his interest in newspapering.”80 The Huntsmans, said Napier-Pearce, believe in the Tribune as an important institution for Salt Lake City and Utah.81
In April 2017, Jon and Paul Huntsman showed themselves unafraid to use the Tribune's news and editorial muscle to battle changes proposed by the University of Utah to the Huntsman Cancer Institute, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Huntsman family. Vivian Lee, vice president of the university's hospitals and medical school, had dismissed the head of the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Mary Beckerle, with a “cowardly” email sent by university president David Pershing. Huntsman Sr. called it a “brutal power grab by Lee.”82 Huntsman Sr. minced no words during a KSL radio interview, proceeding to call the University of Utah president “pathetic” and a person who “should have been let go a long time ago.”83
An April 24 editorial in the Tribune called for “new leadership at the University of Utah and its health sciences colleges.”84
As a result of Huntsman media and financial pressure, Beckerle was reinstated; the president of the university resigned and so did the vice president of the school's hospitals and medical school.85 Clearly the Huntsmans, through the Tribune, had extended the family's leverage in the community.
If the balance wheel of Salt Lake City is being restored, much credit goes to Joan O'Brien and her small group of determined newspaper people and their supporters who became the David that humbled the LDS Church's Goliath.
“We were always careful to refer to our foe as the Deseret News, not its owner, the LDS Church,” O'Brien said in a speech to the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City in June 2016.86
In fact, the church and the News are impossible to separate.
It was a classic American story of a win by an underdog.
States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear.
—Raif Badawi
Mormons make wonderful friends and neighbors. Millions gain spiritual succor from Mormonism. The church does many good works. It desires to have mainstream acceptance, thus the conservative clothing, missionaries in suits, and a highly effective public relations department. This is a result of its unusual origins and its stormy history. Yet many active Mormons may chafe under the conformity required of its culture.1
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has from its beginning been a political institution, a theocracy. Because Mormonism went against the grain of virtually all sacred American mores—sexual, political, dietary, theological—it has been on the defensive since its founding.
As a result, the church has adapted a cloak of persecuted innocence. Historian Will Bagley calls it “an odd defensiveness [that] still characterizes the ‘faithful’ version of Mormon history, which occasionally borders on paranoia.”2 Or, as authors Richard and Joan Ostling put it, “the curious mixture of paranoia and obsessiveness with which Mormons approach church history.”3
Some church leaders certainly held a sincere belief that by silencing the Tribune—its most vocal critic—that it could carry out its policies and practices without oversight and comment.4 They also believed the end justified the means. That the end justifies the means is a constant in the history of the church; it's a given when the continuity of the church is built on divine revelation that must be upheld at all costs. If God revealed it, you can't repeal it.
The effort to mute the Tribune started when printed newspapers were still opinion leaders. By 2016 the objective reporting by the Tribune about Mormonism—especially by Peggy Fletcher Stack—stood out in the explosion of semi-news and outright lies about the church to be found in the digital world.
Changes within Mormonism are glacial and frequently are forced by outsiders or dissidents. For instance, the Washington Post has described recent disclosures about LDS history as opening a new era of transparency in the church.5 With temple rites and LDS beliefs undergoing scrutiny on millions of sites, blogs, and posts, the church would seem to have no choice but to open up.
In fairness, there is more transparency in the church in recent years. Richard Turley's 2007 article on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in the church's Ensign is an even-handed telling of the story—except that Brigham Young is not held responsible for the disaster.6 In 2016, Peggy Fletcher Stack heralded a new openness in that the church was publishing articles using the bylines of historians with footnotes and references. This had not been done since 1966.7 The church struggles to find a balance, and its public relations department—said to be 250 strong—strives for ways to be open.
CONFLICTS CONTINUE
Mormonism comes in many flavors: “active” Mormons make up 40 percent of the total 6.5 million members in the United States. That drops to 25 percent outside the country, and only 30 percent for the church as a whole.8 There are degrees of disagreement within the Mormon community, and as much as mainstream Mormonism would like to be rid of them, they are here to stay.
There are the anti-church thunderers on one end of the spectrum, with the “Mopologists” (Mormon apologists) on the other. There are professional anti-Mormons like the late Sandra and Jerald Tanner and their Lighthouse Ministry.9 There are a number of those from fundamentalist churches who regularly show up to picket the church's semiannual conference and who post lengthy denunciations of Mormonism in thousands of blogs and postings. The dissident Mormons are represented on such sites as Recovery from Mormonism, ex-Mormons.org, and the Mormon Curtain.10
Defending mainstream Mormon scholarship is the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) at Brigham Young University. It does what is called “faithful scholarship,” and its research and publishing supports official positions of the LDS Church.11
The Sunstone Education Foundation publishes a scholarly and critical approach to Mormonism and frequently causes heartburn among the LDS Church leadership.12 A recent Sunstone article explained, “As a church, we desperately need a transparent two-way process for giving and receiving feedback without judgment or recrimination. At this point, I would be grateful even for a culture that could tolerate feedback without bunkering down or battering the already-bruised messengers. The alternative is grim: continued attrition, greater insularity, irrelevance.”13
“Many Mormonisms” are part of Salt Lake City's Great Divide. “I believe the people most angered by the secret 2013 deal were the active, inactive, and dissident Mormons,” said Joan O'Brien of Citizens for Two Voices.14 Dissident Mormons are frequently vocal, recoiling against what they believe to be the inconsistencies and tales they consider deceits.
Further splitting the community are the kinds of teachings offered during a conference on faith and intellect at Brigham Young University in 2016, as described in an op-ed piece in the Tribune on December 4, 2016. “There were repeated references to doubters and those who leave the LDS Church, with charges that such people ‘succumb to spiritual and intellectual laziness’ and lack moral character,” wrote Christy Money, a Mormon and a PhD counselor.15
She views this as part of an “alarming increase in fear-based narratives that distance LDS Church members from unorthodox friends and family.”16
Said one formerly active church member, “I didn't swan dive into Babylon. I was dragged out kicking and screaming by my own conscience.”17
MORMON GOVERNMENT AT WORK, THE THEOCRACY
In Utah, the theocracy is alive and well. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enormous moral authority.
“Almost entirely the LDS Church believes their motives are benign. They want to be upright, charitable people,” said Rod Decke
r, a former Deseret News writer and now a retired political reporter at a Salt Lake television station.18
While it claims political neutrality, the LDS Church must take responsibility for the underlying philosophy guiding politics in Utah. All the members of Utah's congressional delegation are Mormon. An estimated 88 percent of the Utah Legislature is Mormon.19 The governor and lieutenant governor are Mormon. Church and state are melded in Utah as in no other place in America. This creates a kind of exceptionalism.
As part of the theocracy, the politicians, with the implicit consent of the church, offer plenty of targets to the Tribune; its political cartoons and editorials frequently reflect this criticism.
“The church has one issue: they focus on the family,” said Decker.20
And yet the state is last in the nation when it comes to spending per pupil in its public schools. Some of this is due to the large number of children in Mormon families, but some is due to the long-standing mentality of the tight-fisted legislature. The attitude seems to be that teachers are dedicated to their profession and since most of them are Mormon, anyway, they owe it to their church. Largely as a result of this, two in five of all new Utah teachers leave the profession after five years.21 They are among the lowest-paid college graduates in the state. Many must work two jobs. “You just watch your children grow up without you,” said one teacher.22
From half to two-thirds of Utah students are not testing as adequate, proficient, or college ready on various state and national measures.23 These are kids who are part of Mormon families.
Non-Mormons, who tend to have smaller families, pay a disproportionate share of taxes in order to school the children of large LDS families. This inequity festers and occasionally blossoms into rage in letters to the editor published by the Tribune.24
Another hot-button issue is Wasatch Front air quality, which is frequently cited as the worst in the nation. The American Lung Association lists the Salt Lake–Orem–Provo metro area as the seventh worst in the nation for twenty-four-hour particle pollution out of 220 metropolitan US areas.25 At times the pollution in Salt Lake–Orem–Provo has become so noxious that national television has featured it on the news. The state legislature and the congressional delegation support the oil and coal industries and block attempts to legislate for better air quality. Could the church exert more influence to better the environment for its families?