Our press has matured from what was called the "dark days of political partisanship." In the news columns, dailies no longer take sides in campaigns. Fewer than half endorse candidates editorially. Most papers prohibit, as an unconscionable conflict of interest, any staff member's crossing from political observer to participant in any way but voting.
Where the paper is owned by a politician, even one pledged to keep hands off the editorial operation, the same fears arise, though more ambiguously. More criticism than praise has been heaped on Joe Cannon for his impending purchase of the Ogden Standard-Examiner despite his outstanding management credentials and apparently pure motives, to keep the paper in local ownership.Cannon, the chairman of Geneva Steel and architect of its rejuvenation, is also a candidate for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate. As the descendant of an illustrious Utah newspaper family, he is reportedly eager to carry on the family tradition and help satisfy his own zest for public service by accepting the rare opportunity to buy a Utah daily - in this case one founded by his family.
The founder of the Ogden Standard, in 1888, was Cannon's great uncle, Frank J. Cannon. He left the paper in 1892 when he became Utah's delegate to Congress, and the paper was acquired by William Glasmann.
- GLASMANN WAS a political animal, an ardent Republican who served three terms as mayor of Ogden, as speaker of the state House of Representatives and as Ogden postmaster. He was preparing a run for Congress when he died in 1916. And all the while he was editing and managing the Standard. The paper was to become the Standard-Examiner with a merger in 1920, a comfortable newspaper monopoly in its four-county circulation area. It passed entirely into Hatch-Glasmann family hands after World War II and became the pillar of what would become the family's media empire.
William Glasmann's political proclivities roused no great outcry. In the waning days of personal and political and hobby journalism, many owners used their papers as a springboard to office.
William Randolph Hearst, for instance, was a perpetual candidate in the forepart of this century, serving two terms as an indifferent congressman, and running unsuccessfully for New York City mayor, governor and lieutenant governor and for the presidency. Warren Harding went to the Senate and presidency by way of newspaper publishing in Ohio.
Thomas Kearns owned the Salt Lake Tribune, then the mouthpiece of the state Republican Party, as well as the evening Telegram while serving as U.S. senator from Utah from 1901-05.
- TO THIS VERY DAY owner-publishers of community weeklies in Utah and elsewhere have held office, as mayors, school board members, town councilmen, legislators and state commissioners, and they more often than not belong to an assortment of civic clubs and causes. Their readers show a surprising tolerance for what would in larger cities be viewed as a serious conflict of interest, possibly because small towns need leadership. ("Nobody else wanted the job," the mayor-publisher of a Washington state hamlet told a reproving Los Angeles Times.)
Despite the appearance of potential conflicts, the Hatch family believes the sale to Cannon would be the best for the paper, the community and for Cannon himself, "the most positive of all the possible outcomes we have been examining" in retiring the parent company's debt and maintaining the paper's character.
The paper itself, they say, is not distressed, but rather a lean and profitable operation with strong reader penetration in its home counties.
A sale was impelled by the Hatch wing of the family buying out the Glasmann wing and retiring the stock, thereby taking on a substantial debt in tough times. The extent of that debt and the sale price have not been revealed, but they are called substantial.
Randy Hatch, the Standard-Examiner's editor and publisher, says the sale would give the Standard Corp. "a chance to clean up our balance sheets." The company owns a number of other media properties, including KUTV and KALL in Salt Lake City, many of which have been suffering in the recession and would be less attractive to buyers than the Standard-Examiner.
- ANY NUMBER OF highly acquisitive newspaper chains would undoubtedly like to have had a chance at buying the Standard-Examiner. Hatch says the paper identified 80 or 90 potential buyers through a newspaper broker and narrowed that list "to only eight or nine we even wanted to initiate discussions with."
He says, "We wanted the Standard-Examiner to retain its character as a strong community-oriented paper."
Cannon reaffirmed last week, in a series of individual meetings with the newspaper's staffers, that he would not interfere in the management or editorial direction of the paper while a candidate or officeholder. Hatch says Cannon "actually asked us to show him no favoritism. He told us, `If you've got a juicy story about Joe Cannon, run it.' "
In this day, with so many other media voices in every community and with the state media in Salt Lake City looking on, it is not likely that Cannon would go unchallenged if he showed his hand in the paper. Even in Kearns' day, ownership hardly conferred immunity from attack, as O.N. Malmquist's centennial history of the Tribune indicated:
While "Sen. Kearns could of course dictate content and politics of the Tribune, he soon learned that ownership of a newspaper is not an unmixed blessing for a politician. Every Tribune or Telegram news story relating to the senator's activities in Washington, every editorial pointing out his aims or accomplishments, provided a fresh target for the opposition press. Surely there must have been times when Sen. Kearns wondered if he would not be better off with a Tribune owned by [those attacking] than with a Tribune owned by himself defending."
Fortunately, both Cannon and the Standard-Examiner ownership recognize and are entirely up front about the risks involved in a politician's ownership of a daily.IT IS POIGNANT to see a paper that has been in one able ownership, dedicated to community service for nearly a century, passing into other hands, and it must be particularly sad for the Hatches.
There's a wonderful story in Utah lore about how William Glasmann, Randy Hatch's great-grandfather, got into the newspaper business.
Until 1892 Glasmann, a young harness maker from Iowa, maintained an inn at the south end of Great Salt Lake, near Black Rock, and a spread that ran a herd of prize bison. The roadhouse served buffalo steaks to passing teamsters. One day a fearsome windstorm destroyed the inn and freed the buffalo, who escaped to Antelope Island, where their descendants still live.
William decided to give up the roadhouse and move to Ogden; his wife Evelyn and children followed the year after. Though Ogden had had so many papers that it was known as "the graveyard of Western journalism," he threw in his lot with Cannon, becoming editor of the Standard and then its managing editor and proprietor, and the rest is history.