Covering the public actions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is at times difficult but should be done as vigorously as covering any Utah institution, a panel of journalists said Wednesday night.
"Journalists in general like to afflict the comfortable," KUTV reporter Rod Decker reminded the audience. "And there's nobody they want to afflict more in this town than the Mormon Church."
The panel was the kickoff session of the four-day Sunstone Symposium, a yearly event dedicated to "independent Mormon thought."
The media's relationship with the church is not adversarial, Fox 13 news director Renai Bodley noted, but reporters should question the church "when the content of the story dictates we should."
Journalists have a responsibility to cover the actions of the church in the public arena with the same fairness and thoroughness they use to cover any institution, Brooke Adams, religion editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, agreed.
For the Tribune, she said, problems arise when readers — and non-readers — take this coverage as an attack on the church and the faith itself. The paper's editors have occasionally received calls from church leaders complaining that coverage of issues such as the Mountain Meadows massacre or church involvement in the Olympics is "hurtful," she said.
The biggest problem that the church-owned Deseret News has in covering the LDS Church, said Deseret News religion columnist Jerry Johnston, "is not the meddling of the church but the perception in the community that the church is micromanaging" news reporting.
He cited a recent example in which he went with a photographer to take pictures at a local Christian bookstore. He heard later that the photographer had taken pains not to photograph people in front of a wall of crosses when, in fact, the photographer had moved the subjects to take advantage of the room's available light.
Johnston said that the paper's relationship to its owner is not much different from the relationship all media outlets have to their owners and the owners' sacred cows. In the same way that other media would not hold their owners up to ridicule, he said, the Deseret News would not go out of its way to expose or ridicule the LDS Church.
The panel noted that reporters often have trouble gaining access to church leaders when covering stories related to the church. "The (church's) PR office is good, but you always have to go through them; that makes our job very, very difficult," said Adams. When the church chooses not to comment, "we look unbalanced because of that," she said.
But the church's public relations department has improved, Bodley said. Six years ago, when she first arrived at Fox 13, the church would usually answer questions with a fax. Now, she said, they sometimes provide a spokesman to read a statement on air.
The church's relationship to the media has always been problematic, Decker noted. In 1844 in Nauvoo it was Joseph Smith's decision to shut down a paper called the Expositor that led to a 1,300-member militia being sent to the town, which led to Smith's arrest and subsequent death in Carthage jail. In the 1880s, as the territory of Deseret worked toward statehood, the church and its hired lobbyists paid $74,000 to newspapers such as the New York Times to influence coverage, Decker said.
Today, the church has a "fundamental ambivalence" about its public image, he said. "They don't want bad publicity, but they don't want to be too cozy with fashion, with moral fashion in particular."
Decker said that in his newsroom "there's kind of an edge toward the Mormon Church." Still, because many of the station's viewers are LDS, to get good ratings KUTV will often run "softball Mo" stories that make the church look good without making the station look like "we're sucking up" to the church, he said.
Asked how their news organizations would cover a hypothetical story such as embezzlement by a top-ranking church member, Decker said, "We would run it bigger and more often and with more of an edge" than stories about any other local institution, except possibly state government. "No other organization would get such thorough and provocative coverage."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com