Deseret Connect

So, the big news out of Zion is that West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder, dissatisfied with news coverage of his fair city (and of presumably his administration thereof), created a "pen name" with which to write articles more to his liking for publication in the Deseret News.

The Salt Lake Tribune's coverage seemed primarily focused on Winder's actions. For heaven's sake, though, what about editorial control at the Deseret News???

I mean, I understand that the Deseret News has never really been about honest journalism. It's mission has always, always, transparently, been to advance the interests of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's a propaganda machine.

As such, it's never held the market share that the Salt Lake Tribune has (I once received an email from an editor at the Church News stating blandly that they bundled their publication with the Deseret News in order to shore up market share in Utah for the struggling newspaper). Even in Utah, apparently, folks care about honest, real news. We hear enough self-promoting, glazed over horse shit on Sunday from the pulpit.

So I suppose it shouldn't have come as a surprise when the church's media conglomerate (KSL, Bonneville Communications, Deseret News, etc.) made perfectly clear last year that they cared so little for real news that they would lay off a substantial chunk of their journalists and editors and employ an exciting, new, abundantly cheap approach to publishing: Deseret Connect.

The idea here was simple: let anyone who had a story to tell write up the piece and send it in. Conflict of interest? Who cares? Fact checking? Eh. Editorial control? Editors? Background in journalism? A single minute of ethics instruction? No, no and no.

When your goal is to push an agenda, especially one consumed with religious concerns, honest, objective reporting isn't going to be a high priority. The Deseret News wants you to feel good about being a Mormon. Mayor Winder's alter ego apparently did that, with stories that were explicitly aimed at telling his one-sided, self-serving story about how nice West Valley City must be under his leadership.

I have every reason to believe that most of my fellow Utahns will shrug when they hear this story. If they hear this story. The church will shrug. The Deseret News will shrug. The Salt Lake Tribune will shrug.

We live in a culture whose long history is dominated by a man who wrote religious screeds under a pseudonym and who ordered a printing press summarily destroyed under a declaration of martial law when the newspaper it published dared to expose him as the polygamist and adulterer he was (and had vehemently, publicly denied being). Mike Winder was just trying to make people feel good about a city whose Mormon population struggles with a reputation for being one of the most violent, unpleasant places in Utah. A few years ago, he might have been a rising Paul H. Dunn.

I suppose these days, though, there's no shortage of those types in the Lord's church. It's just slightly annoying when they get caught.