Mormon-Owned Paper Stands With Immigrants

[RamboLiberal]

Source: NY Times

SALT LAKE CITY — Joseph A. Cannon is nobody’s liberal. His résumé reads as if it belongs to a delegate to the Republican National Convention, which, incidentally, he was in 2004.

He was an official for the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Utah Republican Party. As editor of The Deseret News, he published editorials condemning deficit spending, same-sex marriage and lenient alcohol laws.

So it was something of a head-scratcher, Mr. Cannon said, when his voice mail and e-mail started filling up with messages from people calling him a “liberal freak” for the sympathetic way his paper often writes about illegal immigrants.

“You have become a dangerous newspaper, one that I am on the verge of discontinuing,” wrote one outraged reader.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/business/media/20deseret.html?hp

[pampango]

1. The News’s...a more liberal embrace of undocumented immigrants...collision with conservative readers

"The News’s push for a more liberal embrace of undocumented immigrants has led to a collision between its editorial mission and its conservative, mostly Mormon, readers. But if this issue seems to stray from the reliably conservative politics of The News, Utah’s second-largest paper behind The Salt Lake Tribune, that may be in part because it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

"That the main sponsor of the Arizona law, Russell Pearce, is a Mormon has not been lost on many Hispanics here. And some active Mormons said they thought that the church, through its media properties, was trying to reassure Hispanics who were suspicious that it condoned anti-immigrant attitudes."

“Obviously, they’re trying to sway public opinion in a big way,” said Stephen Sandstrom, a Republican state representative who is sponsoring a bill that would create a set of strict immigration laws similar to Arizona’s. Mr. Sandstrom, a Mormon, said he was not deterred. “I do have people in e-mails saying, ‘You’d better not back down or I’ll know the church got to you.’ And I just assure them that the L.D.S. church is not directing me one way or another on this.”
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Didn't know that Pearce was a Mormon, just that he was the usual repub partisan fear-monger.

[COLGATE4]

2. I hate to be cynical (not really) but I wonder if the Editor of the

paper is near death or something equally life-changing that is prompting him to 'get right with Jeebus'. Just a thought.

[msongs]

3. mormon church is heavily into converting latino immigrants and latinos overseas - new $$ source nt

[AC_Mem]

4. Exactly.

They are growing their hispanic base and have been for YEARS.

[movonne]

6. Right on...

[Wilms]

5. Many Hispanics oppose same-sex marriage.

This may be no more than an overture for a marriage of convenience.

[David__77]

7. They know where their prospective bread is buttered.

And if the GOP was smart, so would they. If LDS as an organization had an anti-Latino line, then they'd find themselves losing their historic stronghold eventually.