Tribune sale — the truth

The management company that currently produces the Salt Lake Tribune has accused the Deseret News, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and William Dean Singleton, chief executive officer of the MediaNews Group, of misrepresenting the pending sale of the Tribune to MediaNews.

Despite strong public denials by these parties, the Tribune's management company, Salt Lake Tribune Publishing (SLTPC), on the eve of going to court to try to stop owners AT&T from selling the paper, has launched a media blitz to propagate the thesis that Singleton is fronting for the church and the church-owned newspaper, the Deseret News, in a conspiracy to gain control of the Tribune. In a Sunday column in the Tribune, editor James E. Shelledy wrote: "Do I know (such premise) to be true in principle? Yes. Can I prove every detail? No."

The strategy is clear: to sue AT&T and attack the LDS Church.

The Deseret News is not directly involved in the Tribune management company's suit against AT&T, but it has a significant and proper interest in it. Whoever owns the Tribune will own 50 percent of the Newspaper Agency Corp. (NAC). The Deseret News owns the other 50 percent. While the News and Tribune have separate, independent and competitive editorial operations, the NAC controls advertising, circulation and production of both newspapers under a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA), which functions under the Newspaper Preservation Act. The JOA provides that the NAC should work to achieve "substantial equality of circulation for the two newspapers." Under the NAC, the circulation of the News has dropped from about equal to about half that of the Tribune.

Had the Deseret News wished to acquire the Tribune it may have done so. It was recently invited by the Tribune's owner, AT&T, to bid for the paper when AT&T decided to sell it. The Deseret News declined to bid. That left two entities invited by AT&T to bid for the Tribune — the management company made up of family members and officers who formerly owned and sold the Tribune, and Singleton's MediaNews Group, which owns 48 daily newspapers in the United States. His newspapers have won five Pulitzer prizes for journalistic excellence, most recently one last year.

The Tribune management company asserts that the Tribune is a family heirloom of the Kearns-McCarthey family and that family members and partners who formerly owned it have the right to buy it. The Deseret News was advised that the family sold the heirloom in 1997, reaping the benefit of many millions of untaxed dollars. Now they want to buy it back under circumstances that may bring into question the earlier transaction.