The Mormon Church's media holdings, geared more toward profits than proselyting, generate at least $300 million a year in annual sales, The Arizona Republic reported Wednesday.
At any moment during the day, 2.3 million adult Americans are listening to one of the 16 radio and two television stations owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.But unlike the more than 1,000 radio and television stations owned by religious groups, the church does not use its stations to seek converts. The eyes of its managers are fixed on the bottom line.
Other parts of the church's media empire include a newspaper-publishing company, an advertising agency, a book-publishing and retail-sales company, and television-production companies.
Church officials won't disclose how much money the communications companies earn, but the Republic found that $114.4 million of the church's annual media sales come from advertising on television stations KIRO in Seattle and KSL in Salt Lake City.
Both are owned by Salt Lake City-based Bonneville International Corp.
Bonneville's 16 radio stations - the sixth-largest radio group in the country - sell more than $72 million a year in advertising in the nation's largest markets: New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago, Kansas City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Phoenix.
KMEO-AM/FM in Phoenix is its newest station, acquired in March for $12 million cash.
About $50 million in ad revenue is generated each year by the radio stations.
The church's only newspaper, the 63,000-circulation Deseret News, shares in the profits of $89 million in advertising sales under a cooperative agreement with its competitor, The Salt Lake Tribune.
Deseret Book, a book-publishing and wholesale company, also owns and operates a chain of retail stores which sell $97 million a year in books, audio and videotape recordings, mostly to Mormons.
Only the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, with sales topping $155 million per year, is larger among religious publishers.
The church's mandate to those who manage its media empire is straightforward.
"Our owners tell us simply that we have to make a profit and service the communities in which we operate," said Don Gale, Bonneville International spokesman.
KSL President Jack Adamson said, "Wherever (the church) moves into a community, they should be better off physically, financially and in every which way."
As with other church-owned stations, KMEO listeners in Phoenix cannot tell from the easy-listening and adult contemporary music format that the station is owned by a church.
KIRO-AM, Seattle's top-ranked talk-show station, broadcasts the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Sunday mornings, but that is about the only clue as to station ownership.
Why would a church invest so much money if it's not going to broadcast its religious messages?
Howard Hunter, 83, president of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, explains that the stations and publications prefer instead to be role models.
"The overall objective of Deseret News and KSL-TV is to be a voice for Mormonism and its values: family, decency and morality," Hunter said.
Plaques explaining those values are displayed prominently in all the offices of Bonneville's subsidiaries, and every employee is given a wallet-size version.
The church's prohibition of alcohol is reflected by the KSL policy not to air local ads for alcohol. However, it doesn't delete national beer advertising that CBS transmits with its programs.
Similarly, the Deseret News refuses to run local advertising for liquor, beer, tobacco, coffee, tea, X-rated movies, massage parlors or gaming.
KSL-TV has on several occasions drawn the line on programming it considers offensive.
Adamson said KSL refused to broadcast the "Dirty Dancing" television series.
Although Adamson and church officials admit to trying to influence morality on television, they say news coverage is not slanted.
Spencer J. Kinard, former news director at KSL, said allegations of church censorship are "a crock."
Kinard, interviewed before he resigned last fall, said church officials had never told him to ignore issues sensitive to the church. But he acknowledged, "I've been yelled at for running stories."
Whatever the church's attitude about reporting, it clearly encourages an entrepreneurial spirit in other areas of its media enterprises.
More than 20 years ago, it originated the "beautiful music" radio format, an innovation that led to the creation of Bonneville Broadcasting System, a subsidiary of Bonneville International.
Based in Chicago, the subsidiary sells pre-programmed "beautiful music" and "adult contemporary" music tracks to radio stations.
In 1962, Bonneville International participated in the first live satellite television transmission to Europe. Viewers in 18 nations saw scenes from a press conference being conducted by President Kennedy, a Phillies-Cubs baseball game, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing at Mount Rushmore.
Today, Bonneville International is a partner in Keystone Communications, a Salt Lake City-based satellite-transmission company with annual sales of about $25 million.
Keystone provides services for public and closed-circuit broadcasts under contracts with clients that include 20 National Basketball Association teams.
The business started in 1978 as Simmons Satellite Inc., a 50-50 partnership between Bonneville International and Roy Simmons, a Mormon who is president of Zions First National Bank in Salt Lake City.
The partnership installed satellite receiving dishes at 3,000 LDS ward houses in North and Central America, which, at one time, made it the largest private satellite network in the world.