Stern Mormon View

"Americans have never been so overcommitted in foreign entanglements," thundered a recent editorial in the Deseret News. "Never have their natural resources been so extravagantly used, never has the national deficit been so great except in times of all-out war, never have taxes been higher, inflation more out of hand; never has youth faced a more uncertain future, never have there been heavier encroachments on personal liberty by an all-powerful federal government, never has crime been more ugly and broad, never the air more polluted, food, clothing more expensive--ad infinitum."

So the voice of Mormonism characterizes the American scene from Salt Lake City. Deeply concerned with U.S. morals, the Deseret News (circ. 90,224) finds them slipping everywhere -toward permissiveness, collectivism and individual irresponsibility.

The Church Comes First. Owned by the church, the News is closely supervised by the church. Three of its nine-man board of directors belong to the Council of the Twelve Apostles, the church's governing body. Most of its editorial staffers are Mormons; some are summoned from their jobs to go on missions, and they never refuse. The paper accepts no ads for alcoholic beverages, cigarettes or even coffee--unless it is part of a general grocery ad. Staffers are not allowed to smoke in news offices. "It is church property: sacred," says Managing Editor Theron Liddle.

The News relies almost entirely on the wire services for national and international coverage; it devotes its energies to local news and to church events. A banner headline once read:

BEWARE OF EVIL, CHURCH TOLD. Despite its firmly conservative political views, the News never endorses a political candidate for local or national office. "We don't believe religion and politics mix," says Editor William Smart. George Romney, however, could present the paper with a dilemma. The first Mormon to be actively considered for the presidency, Romney also faithfully articulates the Mormon moral outlook. If he won the Republican nomination, the editors concede that they might break precedent and support him. The News was founded in 1850, three years after Brigham Young and his followers arrived in Salt Lake Valley. According to the Book of Mormon, the word deseret means honeybee. For a while the News had Salt Lake City pretty much to itself. But in 1870, the Tribune was started to "oppose the undue exercise of priestly authority." Under the ownership of a wealthy Roman Catholic family named Kearns, the Tribune eventually surpassed the News because of its more comprehensive coverage; it also made light of Mormon officialdom. The church pumped considerable cash into the paper so that it could compete. In 1952 both papers grew weary of battle and combined their advertising and business departments while they remained separate editorially.

Forbidden Fruits. Today, the quarrels of the past have been set aside, and both papers enjoy healthy profits. Not only does the Tribune (circ. 109,738) no longer needle Mormons; it also carries a lot of Mormon news. Some people feel the papers get along a little too well. For one thing, advertisers must pay 75% of the papers' combined rate to place an ad in one paper. Beer and cigarette advertisers feel that this discriminates against them, since they are not allowed to place ads in the News. Ironically, the News then benefits from the forbidden ads since it splits revenue fifty-fifty with the Tribune.

The News is not totally oblivious to a changing world. One of the reasons Publisher E. Earl Hawkes left the Hearst papers for the News in 1964 was a promise that he would not have to put out a "church house organ." Indeed, the News is sometimes at odds with conventional Mormon opinion. The paper got a lot of criticism when it ran a story about Interior Secretary Stewart Udall's criticism of the church position that Negroes are the descendants of Cain and hence ineligible for the priesthood. Himself a Mormon, Udall argued that Founder Joseph Smith held no such view. According to Udall, it was promulgated at a later date when the church "settled for a compromise with its own ideals."

To Utah's non-Mormons, the News is still unrealistically rigid. "If those fellows would just sit back, have a drink and light up a big black cigar," says a top state Democrat, "maybe they'd be closer to human." To the editors of the News, that sort of statement just proves their point about the low state of morals in America.

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