I was living in San Antonio, Texas, when The Salt Lake Tribune published one of the strangest religious commentaries I have ever encountered in a major newspaper in the last 50 years.
On December 23, 2018, the Tribune published an opinion column that repeatedly characterized the “Mormon God” as a Nazi and compared the religious commitments of Latter-day Saints to a concentration camp.
It’s the kind of thing you would expect to find on Reddit, not in a paper that advertises its Pulitzer Prizes on its front page.
This was not a letter to the editor. It was selected, edited, and published by Tribune editors. The paper evidently concluded that comparing the God worshipped by hundreds of thousands of its neighbors to a Nazi fell within the boundaries of respectable civic discourse.
I remember trying to explain this to the people in Texas.
I told them this wasn’t published in the Bible Belt. This was not some obscure blog. It was one of the major newspapers in the city with the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
They were flabbergasted.
“Wait,” one lawyer said, “The Salt Lake newspaper?”
While speaking with a local journalist about the story, I explained that the article did get pushback, but it was mostly about how the editorial was inappropriately antisemitic because it referred to acts of the Old Testament God. This journalist’s jaw literally dropped.
The reactions were instructive because they came from people removed from Utah’s religious rivalries. It seemed obvious to me at the time that if anyone would publish such an editorial, it would be The Salt Lake Tribune, but my local friends didn’t have the decades of accumulated understanding. They simply could not imagine our San Antonio newspaper publishing an equivalent editorial about Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or anyone, really.
Their distance made the abnormality easier to see.
A History of the Anti-Mormon Paper
The Tribune’s anti-Mormon heritage is not some reactive accusation invented by defensive Latter-day Saints. It’s history.
The paper began in 1870 as the Mormon Tribune. It emerged explicitly from a movement organized to oppose The Church of Jesus Christ. When new owners took over the paper in 1873, they intensified the animosity toward the Church.
The Tribune’s anti-Mormon heritage is not some reactive accusation invented by defensive Latter-day Saints.
But the Tribune has tried to assure us that this bias was in the past. In 2014, Terry Orme, then the editor and publisher for the Tribune, wrote, “In the past half-century, The Tribune has operated under the maxim that we are the newspaper for all Utahns, no matter who you are or what you believe.” Orme said that it bothers him that people hold the view that the Salt Lake Tribune was anti-Latter-day Saint. He added that the Tribune includes “points of view that are supportive and critical of the church.”
Beginning in 2016, the Tribune had one of the most eventful decades in newspaper history. That year, the Tribune was purchased by Paul Huntsman. Huntsman, who had no journalistic background himself, moved to replace Terry Orme. Huntsman appointed himself publisher and named Jennifer Napier-Pearce in as the editor. Napier-Pearce came from a background in digital content. Huntsman identifies as a Latter-day Saint and previously served as a bishop.
Two years later, the paper laid off 34 of its 90 journalists. It was that same year that the paper published the Nazi editorial and failed to apologize for it,
Michelle Quist, a columnist for the Tribune, wrote in 2018, “The Salt Lake Tribune is neither anti-Mormon nor anti-Republican.” This was the most straightforward statement from the paper about its orientation to the Church since the Huntsman acquisition.
In 2019 and 2020, the Tribune began a transition to nonprofit status. It was a pioneer among newspapers in making the move. Napier-Pearce resigned in 2020, and Lauren Gustus took over.
Gustus had previously built her career around helping papers transition into the digital era.
Gustus had no relationship with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prior to taking over the paper.
In 2024, the Tribune published an article with a publication byline. The article blamed “polarization, exclusion, othering, resentment, tension, tribalism, anguish, even anger” on Latter-day Saints’ “predominance” in the state.
According to its IRS filings, the Tribune had 123 total employees (not just journalists) in 2022. By their 2025 filing, that number had shrunk to 100.
But while the Tribune’s overall workforce has shrunk, the number of religion reporters has grown. In addition to longtime reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack and managing editor David Noyce, Tamarra Kemsley began working for the Tribune in 2021, and Dylan Eubank began working there in 2025.
Where the Tribune Gets Shortsighted
During this time, we can look at the coverage of the Tribune in relation to The Church of Jesus Christ to see how the Huntsman purchase and later changes impacted the Tribune’s coverage.
Newsworthiness is a matter of judgment. But editorial judgment reveals editorial priorities.
The recent Fairview, Texas temple editorial is perhaps the most glaring example.
In June, the Tribune published an opinion piece from Fairview, Texas Mayor John Hubbard under the headline, “I’m a small-town mayor, and I’m asking the LDS Church for a simple compromise.”
The paper had every right to publish Hubbard’s argument. He is an elected official involved in a divisive public dispute.
The Tribune’s own guidelines require contributors to include inline links for facts, quotations, data, and references. And its policy is to correct errors immediately when discovered. Hubbard wrote that the temple would be “the tallest structure Fairview has ever seen.”
There were public records identifying existing Fairview structures taller than the approved temple. In fact, the temple would be the fourth or fifth tallest structure in Fairview. So I wrote the Tribune’s opinion editor, included the documentation, and requested a correction. As of this writing, the article carries no correction, and the false claim remains in print.
That is factual sloppiness. But it also reveals something about editorial attention. The Tribune showed great interest in publishing a mayor’s claim that the Church refused a “simple compromise” after the Church had already agreed to substantial compromises. But it showed considerably less interest in correcting a central assertion after receiving documentation showing it to be inaccurate.
That same narrowing of vision can be seen in decisions about what counts as news.
For more than a decade, one of the most influential deconversion tools used against Latter-day Saints was the CES Letter. It’s a Gish gallop of poor accuracy. But the document’s effectiveness has rested largely on its origin story as an actual letter from an honest seeker that a Church leader could never respond to.
A lengthy investigation at the letter’s 10th anniversary found that the letter’s story was fabricated. The author had made it up to make the letter more effective.
The Tribune considered the document newsworthy early in its existence. In 2014, it reported on the letter being sent to students and even reported on the letter’s author repeating his (since debunked) claims about his faith journey.
When we offered the research showing the history had been inaccurate to the Tribune to publish, the editors declined, stating they determined it was not newsworthy.
Every newsroom turns down stories. Newsworthiness is a matter of judgment. But editorial judgment reveals editorial priorities. The spread of the CES Letter was news when it embarrassed the Church. Its refutation was not news.
The same pattern appears in the Tribune’s treatment of religious privacy. The paper has demonstrated that it understands why religious communities place boundaries around sacred practice. In 2013, when reporting on a Goshute-owned health clinic, the Tribune noted that it had been blessed by tribal elders “in a private ceremony.” It did not describe the ceremony, speculate about its content, or seek participants to disclose what had occurred.
The paper also honored requests not to use pictures of sacred Native American artifacts in a story they published about an auction. The text the Tribune ran came from the Associated Press, and the decision not to include pictures came from the Tribune’s editorial team. That was the right decision.
But when Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies changed in 2019, the Tribune published detailed accounts of the language being used. The Church has repeatedly requested that such details not be made public. The Tribune has continued reporting on later changes to the endowment in considerable detail. When the subject was propriety around Native American religion, the Tribune was respectful, but when the subject became The Church of Jesus Christ, those same standards were forgotten.
Bias is not the same thing as incompetence.
But the Tribune uses the title “Mormon Land” to refer to its coverage of The Church of Jesus Christ, eight years after a request to stop using the phrase. To the Tribune, GLAAD’s and the AAJA’s name requests are worthy of respect.
The Tribune’s standards also change around whose private words are considered relevant.
In 2024, residents of northwest Las Vegas organized a campaign against the proposed Lone Mountain Nevada Temple. The petition included a list of “reasons to sign.”
This included many typical civic concerns around traffic and zoning. But the listed reasons included many instances of anti-Mormon abuse and religious bigotry.
When Tamarra Kemsley reported on the temple disputes in Nevada and elsewhere, the headline announced that the Church’s temple-building was “fracturing communities across the country.”
The Las Vegas opponents were presented principally as residents defending their neighborhood. None of the anti-Mormon rhetoric visible in the public petition found its way into Kemsley’s reporting.
I expressed my frustration with this reporting to the Tribune. But I was told that because these comments came from non-public figures, the editors felt the comments were not appropriate to include.
There is a principled and defensible concern there—if it were applied consistently.
Only a few months later, the paper published a multi-part “unspoken divide” series about relationships between Latter-day Saints and other Utahns. One story examined neighborhoods that allegedly separated along religious lines. Another story described young men shoveling snow from the sidewalks of church members. These stories included detailed accusations about the behaviors of non-public Latter-day Saints, while also speculating about their motives without basis.
Public comments attached to a coordinated political campaign against a Latter-day Saint temple were deemed too private to publish in an article about the opposition to temples. But private interpretations of private encounters were treated as sufficient evidence for a series diagnosing an entire religious culture. Kemsley also wrote that series.
The issue is not that the Tribune should have avoided publishing about the neighborhood stories. (Though I have other qualms with the series.) The issue is that the standard of when a private citizen’s behavior was worth reporting on changed depending on who would be embarrassed if it were published.
The Tribune’s pattern consistently runs in one direction. It’s institutional shortsightedness.
The Religion Department
The Salt Lake Tribune’s religion reporting has long been nearly synonymous with Peggy Fletcher Stack.
Stack is one of the most well-respected religion journalists in the country. She is also, absolutely, a critic. And she has a particular point of view that her readers have come to expect her to express.
This year is the 35th anniversary of Stack writing for the Tribune. Because of her lengthy coverage, she has developed a reputation. Her news articles have a persistent bias against orthodoxy and the institutional Church of Jesus Christ. She is also a good investigative journalist. Bias is not the same thing as incompetence. And if I reject the assumptions she starts with, I can still appreciate the supported, serious, useful reporting she generates.
For a newspaper that is critical of The Church of Jesus Christ, she is exactly the kind of news reporter you need anchoring your coverage.
Stack turned 75 years old last month. It is possible that she will write for another 25 years. It is also possible that the Tribune is anxiously looking for a plan on how to move forward once Stack leaves.
And as of the moment, it doesn’t look great.
The paper first tried by bringing in Kemsley.
Kemsley came in during a time when journalism was moving away from journalistic neutrality and toward journalistic advocacy. This is in many respects like what we do here at Public Square Magazine, which was founded just a few years earlier. We publish journalism that has a specific point of view and is not shy about asking the reader to come on board with that point of view.
What is different in the way many newspapers have approached this kind of journalism is that the author’s point of view is not made clear up front, and the articles are published in newspaper sections that have been traditionally reserved for straight news and are still identified as straight news. This has certainly been the case with Kemsley.
She writes opinion pieces, most of which are anti-Mormon opinion pieces, but publishes them as straight news stories, like the aforementioned “unspoken divide” series.
Let’s look at two examples of pieces that could reasonably be read as critical toward the institutional Church of Jesus Christ and contrast how Stack writes compared to Kemsley.
In 2018, Stack published an article about conference talk corrections that were made. The article was clearly an attempt to undermine Latter-day Saint trust in the institution. But the article was process-oriented. It focused on what happened and when it happened.
Compare that to Kemsley’s recent article that called Pioneer Day a form of “anti-Indigenous racism.” Here the conclusion is foregrounded, the rhetoric is incendiary, and disagreement is framed as moral failure.
Kemsley’s journalistic failures are often executed in more nuanced ways. Let’s take, for example, a 2022 article. In it, Kemsley argues that the Latter-day Saint hymn “Love at Home” celebrates slave owners. She explains this argument at length in the authoritative voice, only after multiple paragraphs attributing it to just one author’s conference presentation.
By eventually attributing the argument to a third party, it can be justified to present the article as straight news. But most readers could clearly identify the article as an opinion piece. Kemsley’s voice regularly repeats, emphasizes, and doubles down on the presentation’s conclusion. She provides no space for additional context or rebuttal, while leaving out relevant details. It’s these kinds of rhetorical sleights of hand that have made Kemsley’s work so untrustworthy.
Early on in her time at the Tribune, I spoke with Kemsley and offered to help provide her Latter-day Saint sources for stories to help balance out her content. But because of Kemsley’s persistent failure to fairly represent their voices, those contacts subsequently declined to work with her again. She continues to write about Latter-day Saint issues, but many faithful Latter-day Saints won’t talk to her. When a journalist has lost credibility with the people on their beat, they can no longer effectively do their job.
Eubank’s career has so far taken a different trajectory. His articles look a lot like what you might expect to find from a beat writer 40 years ago.
Some of his stories are interesting—for example, “BYU study shows gender and generational gap in LDS Church retention”—while others seem like he was struggling to find a subject to file on by his deadline, like in “Two unlikely monuments 4,000 miles apart honor the same 410 Mormon pioneers.”
He has written about the Church’s announcement that it had more missionaries out than ever before, announcements of temple renderings, and remarks from regional leaders that cross into political issues.
Tribune leaders need to forge a careful path forward.
But he also only began writing for the paper last year. Doing beat reporting can be a solid foundation for eventually moving into the heavier reporting Stack has become known for.
And we can’t discuss the direction of The Tribune’s religious coverage without mentioning Jana Riess. Riess is not a Tribune reporter but an opinion columnist for Religion News Service whose work the Tribune republishes with great frequency. She also appears regularly on the Tribune’s religion podcast Mormon Land.
Because her columns appear alongside staff religion reporting and focus heavily on Latter-day Saint institutions, culture, and belief, she functions for many readers as a de facto Tribune columnist on the Church.
Riess contributes a consistently skeptical, reform-minded perspective to the newspaper’s religion section. Riess’ positions are consistently in tension with those of the institutional Church and the majority of its members.
Riess’ writing often begins with controversy or some other news story and uses it to advance a broader argument about a Church issue. In many ways her writing mirrors the kind of writing we do at Public Square—editorial writing, except hers is from a critical rather than faithful perspective. At her best, Riess is attentive to survey limitations, acknowledges counterevidence, and explains uncertainty more carefully than many Tribune news stories do. At her weakest, however, she can move too quickly from selected examples to sweeping conclusions, treat speculation about leaders’ motives as persuasive analysis, or state disputed claims more confidently than the underlying evidence permits.
But while the Tribune does not always clearly label her work as opinion, at least not as clearly as RNS does, her columns are, in fact, filed and published as opinion pieces.
The Tribune does have other occasional columnists in the space. Humor columnist Robert Kirby sometimes touches on church issues from an irreverent perspective, and Eli McCann critiques the Church on LGBT+ issues. The Tribune has no columnist that takes supportive perspectives on Latter-day Saint issues often or with any consistency.
What’s Next
I can imagine two kinds of responses to this article. The first comes from our regular readers—folks who are media savvy and have long since discounted the Tribune as a lost cause. They might wonder why this is even worth pointing out at all.
The other response is that these complaints are parochial and reactive. These are the folks who would accuse Latter-day Saints of having a persecution complex, or who might reflexively push back against complaints as illegitimate critiques of “the media.”
I want to push back against both kinds of responses. The Tribune can do good. And at its best it does. Latter-day Saints are not harmed by even critical investigation. Latter-day Saints are no strangers to the idea that power can be corrupting. The press has long played a role in helping to check and correct that power even when it is religious.
But to get there, Tribune leaders need to forge a careful path forward.
First of all, they need to be more open about the critical perspective that animates their editorials. They would be much easier to respect if they were honest and open about that built-in sentiment.
Then they need to place Kemsley firmly in their opinion department. Her work has long since left the world of news reporting behind.
Even while being open about its perspective, the Tribune needs to recognize that in everything except their narrow local context, Latter-day Saints are religious minorities, and recognize that in their reporting. Suggesting that Latter-day Saints are bad neighbors, or that they worship a Nazi God, does real harm that goes well beyond a reasonable critical editorial bent.
And while it appears to me they are trying to find a long-term replacement for Stack, they need to acknowledge that they haven’t yet. Perhaps Eubank is on course to fill that role, or maybe they need to find someone else still. If they want to write good journalism that holds The Church of Jesus Christ to account, they need someone who can write it, and at present there is no one in their stable outside of Stack who has demonstrated an ability to fill that role.
The Tribune’s history makes it clear that it will never be the paper for all Utahns. The fact that it has still not apologized for the Nazi editorial makes that rather clear. But a transparent, critical editorial bent paired with straight news and investigative journalism can be valuable. There’s no reason to pretend to be something different. Let’s hope they can get there.
