LETTERS

DEAN'S LIST

Your cover story about Dean Singleton and his journalistic empire (CJR, March/April) was nauseatingly informative.

We’d had the misfortune to subscribe to his Los Angeles Daily News — a mean, deceitful pretense at unbiased reporting. Its failed attempt to divide Los Angeles was great news in our household. Car dealers, real estate interests, and local politicians joined the Daily News in clandestine meetings. Fortunately, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the “plot” and, later, helped prevent the planned “coup.”

Though we believe competition is better than monopoly, our cancellation of the Daily News was no loss.

Preston P. Birenbaum
Woodland Hills, California

Your piece on Dean Singleton’s Salt Lake Tribune was well done, with one exception: the Tribune was not “reeling” when it entered the operating agreement with the Deseret News. Not only had circulation increased throughout the Deseret News’s disastrous go-for-broke circulation campaign of 1947-52, but so had advertising linage and revenues. Because of the increased cost of defensive circulation promotions and the large strike-caused increases in the cost of newsprint, Tribune profits dropped from $700,000 in 1947 to $150,000 in 1952.

The Tribune, far from “reeling,” agreed to the joint operation being assured of the majority profit share of a sole newspaper advertising medium in the rich Salt Lake market. The Tribune took over management of the Deseret News at the request of then Mormon Church president David O. McKay, who told his friend John Fitzpatrick, then Tribune publisher, that Deseret News would cease publication if the Tribune refused.

Understanding this fact — that the Tribune was the salvation of the never-did-well Deseret News and for fifty years thereafter the good and faithful steward of a very prosperous Deseret News — is necessary for recognizing the enormity of the Deseret News’s machinations of the past five years to deny ownership by the Kearns McCarthey family of the Tribune, which under that family’s hundred-year ownership has been the protector of all Utahans against infringement of the civil, temporal, and political rights of this Mormon Church-State.

J.W. Gallivan
Publisher emeritus
Salt Lake Tribune
Park City, Utah

KR COUNTERPOINT

In the March/April issue, CJR ran a relatively defamatory “sound bite” about Knight Ridder. It was an excerpt from the Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede’s February rant against the Herald’s parent corporation.

A week later, the Herald’s executive editor, Tom Fieldler, ran a counterpoint column, which was not picked up by CJR. In fairness, here is an excerpt.

“What he [Fieldler] failed to say is that Knight Ridder’s profit goals are more modest than some of its newspaper-industry peers, including Gannett, publisher of USA Today, or the Tribune Company, which publishes the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. It’s self-evident that a newspaper that fails to remain financially strong cannot long survive. Such was the fate of The Miami News and scores of other papers that didn’t change with the times. John S. Knight himself reminded his editors that journalistic quality rested on a foundation of financial success. Knight Ridder papers — the Herald chief among them — reflect that philosophy today and remain among the best in the industry.”

Polk Laffoon IV
Vice president, corporate relations, Knight Ridder
San Jose, California

OBJECT LESSON

In his excellent article insisting that public opinion surveys, in an increasingly diverse America, should include languages other than English (CJR, January/February), Sergio Bendixen says of ethnic polling that: “Pollsters and the English-language media alike will simply be emulating King Canute’s futility if they try to hold it back.”

King Canute went to the seashore in order to prove to his fawning courtiers that even a monarch as powerful as he was could not hold back the inexorable forces of nature. His mission was the opposite of the “futility” with which Bendixen belabors him. Canute has been the victim of a bad press for more than a thousand years and it’s about time someone set the record straight.

Ron Haggart
Toronto, Ontario

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