By JEREMY W. PETERS
The New York Times
September 19, 2010
SALT LAKE CITY — Joseph A. Cannon is nobody’s liberal. His résumé reads as if it belongs to a delegate to the Republican National Convention, which, incidentally, he was in 2004.
He was an official for the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Utah Republican Party. As editor of The Deseret News, he published editorials condemning deficit spending, same-sex marriage and lenient alcohol laws.
So it was something of a head-scratcher, Mr. Cannon said, when his voice mail and e-mail started filling up with messages from people calling him a “liberal freak” for the sympathetic way his paper often writes about illegal immigrants.
“You have become a dangerous newspaper, one that I am on the verge of discontinuing,” wrote one outraged reader.
The News’s push for a more liberal embrace of undocumented immigrants has led to a collision between its editorial mission and its conservative, mostly Mormon, readers. But if this issue seems to stray from the reliably conservative politics of The News, Utah’s second-largest paper behind The Salt Lake Tribune, that may be in part because it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Hispanics are the most populous minority group in the country — and they represent a vast potential constituency for the Mormon church, which has already made considerable efforts to develop strong relations with Hispanic communities. Those efforts include, since February, a Spanish-language paper called El Observador.
“The church’s practice is to say, ‘Look, we’re not immigration agents. We care for the soul,’ ” Mr. Cannon said in an interview from his office in downtown Salt Lake City, where he can look out his window at the towering spires of the Salt Lake Temple.
Both The News and El Observador are owned by the Deseret Media Companies (pronounced DEZ-er-ET; it is named after the provisional state of Deseret founded by Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley in 1849), which also owns Utah’s largest television station, KSL, and its largest news Web site, KSL.com.
Because any editorial that appears under the Deseret Media masthead carries the unofficial imprimatur of the church in many Mormons’ eyes, Deseret editors and executives could indeed help shape opinions in the heavily Mormon state Legislature, where lawmakers are debating a zero-tolerance illegal immigration law similar to the one passed in Arizona this year.
For the time being, church leaders seem uninterested in wading into the debate by taking an official policy position, as they did by declaring support for the referendum to ban same-sex marriage in California. Rather, it has made only a benign public appeal for “careful reflection and civil discourse” on the issue. But that has hardly soothed matters.
That the main sponsor of the Arizona law, Russell Pearce, is a Mormon has not been lost on many Hispanics here. And some active Mormons said they thought that the church, through its media properties, was trying to reassure Hispanics who were suspicious that it condoned anti-immigrant attitudes.
“Some of my Latino friends have said, ‘I’m going to leave the church over this,’ ” said Tony Yapias, director of Proyecto Latino de Utah, a Latino outreach group. “My view is that this is an aggressive way for the L.D.S. church to very effectively use their media power to try to soften up the community. They’re sending a message to their members.”
Both Mr. Cannon and Deseret Media’s chief executive, Mark H. Willes, said they never sought approval from church officials on any editorial or article they ran. They said the church also never asked to see an article before it was printed, though former editors said the practice had been to fax drafts of editorials to church headquarters.
The newsroom at The Deseret News is a mix of practicing and nonpracticing Mormons and people of other religious beliefs. It is not a strictly doctrinaire environment. There is a coffee machine in the break room, despite the church’s discouragement of drinking caffeinated beverages.
But as Mr. Cannon makes clear, The Deseret News is hardly going to run something that would offend its owners.
“No one is going to write an editorial here that we thought was inconsistent with or would poke the church in the eye,” said Mr. Cannon, who this week will move on to become a special adviser to the editorial board. “That’s not going to happen.”
Themes that appear in The Deseret News’s coverage of immigration are often echoed in El Observador. Its editor, Patricia Dark, said the paper now had 7,000 subscribers who received home delivery. Subscribers pay nothing; the three-times-a-week paper is subsidized by the church.
With a staff of three full-time reporters, El Observador typically devotes two or three articles in each edition to immigration-related topics. A major theme is the effect that deportation has on families. “Terror en familias hispanas” read one recent front-page headline.
“The breaking up of families is horrific, so we want to highlight that,” said Ms. Dark. Among Mormons, whose faith teaches that the family bond should be eternally inviolate, the issue of severing families is especially resonant.
Selecting themes and story lines that will appeal to Mormon values has been one way Deseret Media has tried to shift the debate.
Last month, Mr. Willes took the highly unusual step of writing an editorial that simultaneously ran on the front pages of The News and El Observador. The editorial, accompanied in print by an image of the Statue of Liberty with its famous inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” was also read by Mr. Willes on KSL, Salt Lake City’s NBC affiliate, and the KSL radio station.
“We, of all people, should be sensitive to the desire of others to provide more opportunities for themselves and their families,” Mr. Willes wrote, making a direct appeal to Mormons’ sense of their history. Like Mormons, who fled the Midwest in the mid-19th century after failing to assimilate into society, undocumented immigrants know what it is like to be outcasts, Mr. Willes said.
But those who find their positions on immigration criticized by Mr. Willes’s media companies see journalistic bias, not Mormon values, at work.
“Obviously, they’re trying to sway public opinion in a big way,” said Stephen Sandstrom, a Republican state representative who is sponsoring a bill that would create a set of strict immigration laws similar to Arizona’s. Mr. Sandstrom, a Mormon, said he was not deterred. “I do have people in e-mails saying, ‘You’d better not back down or I’ll know the church got to you.’ And I just assure them that the L.D.S. church is not directing me one way or another on this.”
The immigration issue has become intensely personal for Mr. Willes, a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times who was selected by church leaders to run Deseret Media a year and a half ago.
He has consulted lawyers to advise him on the technicalities of immigration law and convened a committee of Deseret Media editors and executives that meets to brainstorm ideas on immigration coverage. “Everywhere we looked, the problem just seemed substantially more complicated than the dialogue,” he said.
Mr. Cannon acknowledged that changing minds would be difficult, but he said he hoped at the very least to challenge readers to reflect on immigration through the teachings of their religion.
“What are the two commandments? Love God and love your neighbor,” he said. “These people are our neighbors — incontestably, by any definition, they are our neighbors.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/business/media/20deseret.html?_r=1&hp
