Becoming 'Utah's storyteller'

"What was I thinking?" That's what Ken Verdoia wonders aloud as he sits in his office, just days after he served as The Face of the PBS documentary about the LDS Church and then as moderator of the Sean Hannity-Rocky Anderson circus/debate at the University of Utah.

In the space of five days, the documentary filmmaker waded deep into the middle of touchy subjects in televised, high-profile media events.

"There are two things you don't do in this business; you don't talk about religion or politics," he says. "I received that admonition for 30 years. Then in one week I do both. What was I thinking?"

Being called upon to help carry a four-hour film and represent a major university in an overhyped debate is heady stuff for anyone but especially for a man who stuttered so badly as a child that he required years of therapy and was terrified of public speaking. The irony was not lost on Verdoia, but the visibility of it all and the sensitivity of the subjects brought the inevitable fallout. Verdoia received a deluge of phone calls and e-mail from angry viewers who accused him of both of being a puppet and apologist for the LDS Church and anti-Mormon.

"What that tells me is that people see things through their own values," says Verdoia. "If you catch heat from both sides of an issue, that means you've gone right down the middle. But there are times when that battering does weigh on you."

On the Wednesday night after the two-part PBS series "The Mormons," he was so disillusioned by the reaction to his part in the documentary that his wife and two daughters found themselves trying to cheer him up over dinner.

"I was as low as I've ever felt," he says. "I just wanted to grab someone and say, 'Can't you see what I'm trying to do? I'm just trying to show both sides, to illuminate, not incinerate.'"

He had little time to digest the reaction. Two nights later, Verdoia, director of production services for University of Utah-owned TV station KUED, was asked by the U.'s administration to referee the Hannity-Anderson debate at Kingsbury Hall.

Verdoia decided the best way to prepare for the event was by not preparing for it all; he mowed his lawn instead.

"I wanted to be flexible and fair," he said. But he never had a chance. "The crowd heckled the warm-up act, (radio host) Doug Wright, who has never said anything controversial in his life," says Verdoia. In the end, with the heckling and booing and the personal attacks, the debate was more WWF Smackdown than Lincoln-Douglas. The debaters ignored the ground rules, with Anderson exceeding his time limit and Hannity starting the personal attacks.