News' reporting 'reckless and deceptive'

In a "news analysis" (Oct. 8), where, oddly, he analyzes his own reporting, Mr. Snyder maintains that the term "bar tab" was appropriate because the Grand America venue was a "private club." According to Mr. Snyder, a private club is Utah's equivalent of a bar; therefore everything on the bill can be considered a "bar tab." This is an odd rationalization for using such deceptive language.

Two problems: First, no one would consider the New Yorker or the Alta Club, both of which are private clubs, to be a "bar." Second, the Grand America venue was not a private club, as falsely represented by Mr. Snyder. It operated as a restaurant — a discernible fact for any reporter concerned with the truth.

After repeatedly mischaracterizing a dinner bill to be a "bar tab," Snyder claimed that I spent gobs of taxpayer funds on a bicycle trip from Lyon to Torino. Then the Deseret Morning News claimed that I paid the taxpayer funds back with private contributions. All these claims are false. Not a dime of taxpayer money was spent for my trip and, in the end, no taxpayer funds will have been spent on the Message to Torino project. Everything was entirely legal and not only appropriate but furthered an important public objective — carrying on an Olympic tradition of sending a delegation to deliver a message on the environment to the next Winter Olympic host city without the use of any fossil fuels. Lillehammer delivered such a message to Nagano, and Nagano delivered a message to Salt Lake City in 2002.

In the midst of this media weirdness, I was being interviewed by a Guardian reporter, Gary Younge. Snyder called to talk to me yet once again about the so-called "bar tab." During the conversation, Younge shook his head and laughed. Referring solely to Snyder's misinformation campaign and his (and the Deseret Morning News') fixation on the consumption of alcohol, I laughed and joked with Younge: "Sometimes it feels like I'm in the middle of a Kafka novel, with a little Taliban thrown in." Younge quoted me, lightheartedly, in his Guardian article.

After reading Younge's article, Snyder asked me if I had in mind the LDS Church when I made the comment about the Taliban. I said, "Absolutely not. I was referring to you and your newspaper." The next day the Deseret Morning News ran the headline, "LDS Church not Taliban, Rocky says." The reporter dreamed up the association, I told him that is not at all what I had in mind, then the newspaper published a "Mayor-denies-still-beating-his-wife" kind of headline — obviously calculated to enrage the newspaper's mostly LDS readership.

In the article, Snyder completely mischaracterized my comment to Younge, stating that I was "comparing life in Utah's capital to life under the rule of the Taliban." A complete fiction. But the mischaracterization led to a scathing editorial in the Ogden Standard Examiner, as well as angry e-mails and an angry letter to the editor from someone who was deceptively led by Snyder to believe I had said what I never said — and have never thought.

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Rocky Anderson is the mayor of Salt Lake City.

Editor's note: Senior editors at the Deseret Morning News stand by Mr. Snyder, his reporting and the accuracy of the stories as they appeared in the newspaper.