The Deseret News is Failing Utah

It's time for the newspaper to prioritize principle over partisanship

Part of journalism’s ethos is . . . afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

– Dale Cressman, emeritus professor, BYU School of Communications

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illustration courtesy of Beck Seamons

Since January, President Trump and his administration have waged constant war against Congress, the judiciary, universities, our European and North American allies, law firms, immigrants, and a variety of other individuals and institutions that the president perceives as disloyal. With each passing day, it becomes more and more clear that Donald Trump is intent on turning the United States government into an authoritarian regime. It is also now clear that Trump’s policies will make the United States less prosperous, less safe, and less free.

Yet in the midst of this frightening whirlwind, the journalists at the Deseret News continue to act as though the skies are untroubled. Indeed, the publication’s articles are consistently superficial and half-reported, which has the effect of downplaying the shocking and illegal actions of Trump and his allies.

For example, in her March 28 article on Senator Mike Lee’s visit to Greenland, congressional correspondent Cami Mondeaux ignored the main story—that Donald Trump was trying to coerce a European ally into relinquishing territory to the United States—and approvingly quoted a bevy of Republican officials, including Mike Lee, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump himself.

Mondeaux found the space to quote two of Mike Lee’s posts on X—neither of which was newsworthy—but evaded the essential fact that Denmark staunchly opposed the visit from the president’s team. Instead of vaguely stating that Trump’s efforts to acquire Denmark aren’t “without controversy,” Mondeaux ought to have quoted the prime minister of Greenland, who stated that “the only purpose [of the visit] is to demonstrate power over us.”

Journalism is supposed to inform and enlighten; Mondeaux’s article did neither. Her reporting, which consisted almost entirely of quotations from Republican officials, served to obfuscate, not clarify, the absurdity and danger of Trump’s imperialist foreign policy.

The same day, Mondeaux published an end-of-week roundup that, curiously, buried what was without a doubt the most significant news item of the week: the revelation that national security advisor Michael Waltz had added the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal, and that secretary of defense Pete Hegseth had later used the group chat to share sensitive attack plans.

Rather than opening her newsletter with how Utah’s elected officials responded to the scandal that rocked Washington, Mondeaux led with an uncritical synopsis of Senator Mike Lee’s radical effort to undermine the judicial branch, which he deems too hostile to President Trump’s agenda. Lee’s reckless scheme to allow Trump to sidestep a critical check on his power deserves coverage, but not ahead of breaking news, and certainly not in the way that Mondeaux covered it. 

Mike Lee is an obsequious ally of Trump’s who does the president’s bidding even if that includes subverting a fair and free election. Thus, when he accuses the courts of “blatantly unconstitutional overreach,” that accusation needs to be contextualized and challenged—not simply repeated. If Mike Lee wants to promulgate half-truths and demonstrate his total fealty to the president, he can do so himself; the Deseret News need not be an accomplice in those efforts.

Mondeaux is not the only offender. Earlier in March, when politics reporter Eva Terry covered Senator John Curtis’s visit to BYU, her reporting was shallow and one-sided. In her article, Terry quoted Curtis’s claim that Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government is best understood as an attempt to balance the federal budget. This stance is, at best, highly misleading.

Instead of accepting that claim at face value, Ms. Terry ought to have interrogated it. This is what journalism is all about: performing the public service of fact-checking politicians and correcting them when they misstate the facts.

If Terry had done this crucial part of her job, either by talking to experts or by doing her own digging, she would have discovered that President Trump is presiding over a vast, chaotic, and extremely damaging attack on agencies and institutions that keep Americans safe. As Tom Nichols put it in the Atlantic, DOGE is “a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government” and “an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.”

This is not a matter of balancing the budget, as Curtis claimed, but because Terry did not do her job fully, the senator’s eyebrow-raising assertion went uncontested. 

An even graver error was Terry’s decision to let Senator Curtis claim that it was not his responsibility to stand up to President Trump. Curtis suggested that constituents who were worried about the president’s behavior should “take a harder look at why [they] are electing the type of people [they] are electing instead of looking to Washington D.C., to fix it.”

Deflecting blame towards the “families” and “communities” who were responsible for President Trump’s victory is a red herring; regardless of who elected Donald Trump, Curtis is now one of the few Americans in a position to restrain him. Further, it makes little sense to point the finger elsewhere when Curtis is guilty of approving some of the president’s most harmful cabinet appointees, namely Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, and Kash Patel.

Yet neither of these obvious objections was raised, as Terry did little more than offer a shortened transcript of Curtis’s remarks. Call that what you will—public relations, advertising, content creation—but it lacks the rigor and integrity of true journalism. The chief error here—as in Mondeaxu’s reporting—is the lack of critical analysis, the absence of an informed and skeptical guide to sift through Curtis’s statements on behalf of the reader.  

The current shortcomings of the Deseret News matter because Utah has an important role to play in scrubbing conservatism of the stains of the MAGA movement. Utah Republicans have largely capitulated to Trump and his disastrous impulses, but the state could yet present an alternative to the criminality, cruelty, and incompetence that cling to President Trump and to the party he now commands. Utah could yet live up to the New York Time’s generous characterization of it as “a redoubt of a kinder, gentler and more civil kind of Republicanism.”

But if Utah is to lead an anti-MAGA coalition within the Republican Party, it will need to be accompanied by a revitalized Deseret News, a Deseret News that looks a lot less like Fox News and a lot more like responsible center-right publications such as The Bulwark and The Economist. 

A good place to start would be Journalism 101: striving for balance, no longer taking politicians at their word, and providing readers with context and background information.