Blog fueled doubts on Cannon neutrality

It is, of course, a clear conflict of interest to be the chairman of the Utah Republican Party and have your younger brother a U.S. congressman, running for re-election every two years.

Joe Cannon, party chairman, has been in that position for six years now.

And one would think that Joe would have gotten the situation fairly well down, especially since little brother Chris Cannon, R-Utah, has seen credible challenges from within the Utah Republican Party during most re-election years.

But Joe admits that he made a mistake the last weekend before the June 27 primary when he wrote a response to an attack on Chris and himself on what Joe says is "an obscure Web site."

"I wouldn't have (written the blog response) if I'd known that some (media) would pick it up," Joe said last week.

Chris Cannon ended up beating challenger John Jacob rather handily. And it happened despite Jacob spending more than $400,000 of his own money in the challenge to Chris Cannon. Jacob's loss came mainly because his campaign self-destructed toward the end — a destruction that had nothing to do with Joe Cannon.

Joe Cannon is a member of the Deseret Morning News' board of directors, a position he's held since LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley reorganized a decade ago all of the church-owned businesses, getting sitting church general authorities off of those boards.

Joe has, to the best of my knowledge, never interfered in any Morning News story, including any politically-based story.

The blog, however, accused Joe Cannon of being the source behind a Morning News scoop that Jacob had hired two immigrant workers several years ago. Jacob opponents claimed that Jacob hired the married couple illegally. As it turned out, Jacob apparently hired the couple legally. But, admittedly, it was the first of several incidents that side-tracked Jacob's campaign and, ultimately, led to his defeat in the primary election.

Morning News editors decided to place at the end of the immigrant stories an editor's note, which said that Joe Cannon, brother of candidate Chris Cannon, sits on the newspaper's board.

Apparently the blogger decided that that disclaimer led to the Morning News doing the story because Joe Cannon fed us the story.

That is not true.