Is KSL Just a Church-owned Tabloid Now?

so I just want to get something straight here you're the guy you're the one that got the apology out of KSL this is the second time in one month I've done a news article about some stupid leftwing woke thing that KSL the church-owned news outlet has done and it makes me think if I'm batting two stories a month on woke KSL it's effectively a tabloid what is this like The Daily Beast you know C can we just offload it do we have our own Vice news now or if we're going to be a tabloid can KSL just like start following around Utah influencers and just getting paparazzo picks of them because it' be kind of cool to see quu L and them and analyzing you know whether he's wearing fresh new Nike heirs with his tasteful Ensemble you know like either are we going to have a church-owned tabloid or not this is going to be the best day ever this is going to be the best day ever wake up news is always biased how is this getting out on a church own news outlet and she talked about how they wanted to get reactions out of Their audience with this type of post do we figure out who Roto is it just some kind of Rogue intern the following is an episode of Ward radio and does not represent the thoughts or the opinions of kts its owners or any of its Affiliates nor does it represent the official opinion of the Church of Jesus Christ of LV Saints with that said sit back relax and enjoy the program hey guys welcome back to Ward radio news I'm your host Carden Ellis and today I'm joined in the studio by Luke Hansen head of Ward radio news as well as Tommy Stevenson one of his Pals from The Cougar Chronicle and where you working now the post-millennial right Tommy post millennial okay excellent and um I don't really know how to introduce this topic other than saying it seems like KSL the church-owned newspaper media Outlet is misbehaving again would you guys say that's a fair uh statement um for those of you that aren't in the know uh the Church of Jesus Christ latterday Saints aka the Mormon Church actually owns two media Outlets uh they actually used to basically own a third the LA Times I don't know if you guys knew that but the church had like a majority stakehold or something like that in the Los Angeles Times that's interesting yeah they only offloaded it in like the late 90s but it was in like the past 20 to 25 years they got rid of their like 40% shares in the LA times but uh the church owns KSL probably the more the more prominent uh at least televised and online media Outlet in Utah as well as Deseret News Now recently whether it's with Michael nolles or um whether it's what we're about to talk to um talk about this week uh KSL has said kind of just like a lot of cruel and pejorative things that you would think is basically below a tabloid and definitely below a church owned news outlet and they keep getting caught for it and one of the odd questions I'm oftentimes asked as basically the only prds live stream on YouTube right now uh is the Mormon Church going woke go and they'll they'll show me all these different things that basically KSL keeps saying and so um I brought you guys on because Luke here recently wrote a super interesting article on Ward radio news about the church-owned KSL News coming under Fire I'm going to pull it up so the audience can see it um but it says Church owned KSL News comes Under Fire issues apology for complaining about quote Republic Republican party's Antics um and so I I wanted to bring you guys on just to tell us what's going on here I mean I I don't think the Church of Jesus Christ latterday Saints is going woke but it seems like its news outlets are like what tell us what's going on Luke yeah so here's the thing I'm the editor-in chief of w radio news which is like a small startup News company and I'm the whole thing I'm the editor and chief I write most of the Articles and then I have to edit my own articles don't out us L we have a newsroom full of interns and five we we do have other people working for us but the point of bringing that up is even in kind of this uh small role that I'm playing in news I feel like I've got to be impartial about this like I've just got to give both sides of it I always give these caveats when I've talked about the story like oh now here's commentator Luke it's not Newsroom Luke and then you have like an apperently Professional Organization that's not just calls itself news like CNN or something like that does but it's actually owned and operated by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which for decades has had a pretty strong political neutrality stand on issues yeah and and they're out there doing what they did this past week which was they posted on Facebook I it doesn't look like this ever went on X or Instagram but at least on Facebook KSL News radio posted post that says Utah's Republican party has been running into tough times okay I mean it's a little bit biased against Republicans but if they're running against tough times they're running against tough times fine that's a very generalized statement yeah that's not like wildly perjorative but what followed it was kind of like huh are you tired of the Republican party's Antics wow which I think across the board it's not like a super big statement of of political bias but it's clearly like okay this is anti-republican from an apparently yeah from an apparently politically neutral newspaper which is from our very politically neutral church and so obviously that raised a couple of eyebrows and and Mike Lee was one of them I think he he kind of got on this first and he said raise your hand if you dislike the way KSL consistently integrates conservatives and speaks for the left oh dude Sav he added on to that this isn't a one-off event this is consistent and systematic that this has been happening wow dude I'm looking at this right here and he straight up gets involved and this guy's like Mr Pro Church dude whoa wow okay holy smoke Mike Lee will like what somebody posted like oh should I burn this book today or tomorrow it was something along those lines about the Book of Mormon and he just quote tweeted it and said read it God I'm pretty sure that was a the Tweet was like a bait tweet it was a member of the church that posted that oh they got a huge reaction out of that oh okay that's fine he's posted like defending the doctrine of the godhead about the Trinity and saying like well we can actually understand ours like he gives pretty cool theological takes he's not just like Mr Robot I'm a Republican bill 108 needs to pass right now kind of guy at least on X so okay so what happened so okay see so so he hops in do we figure out who wrote it was it just some kind of Rogue intern was it somebody that was just you know got the username and password and decided to write some funny stuff on there like happened to Justin Trudeau up in Canada or was this you know demonstrative of a more systemic issue so the well I mean there has to be some sort of vetting process I mean it's their official Facebook page so either they don't have procedures in place that they need to have in place or this actually went through a couple of people and got posted anyway it it made a h especially on X and they eventually took down and released a statement which is also in the news article where they said um this morning we did not live up to that standard meaning our standard of political neutrality and our treatment of the story we take our journalistic standards seriously and we're handling the matter internally so that's all the information they gave about what were went what went wrong and what they were doing about it but they acknowledged the problem and they deleted the post and actually Tommy maybe wasn't explicitly involved with this happening but he sort of took aart in the story I have some insight into this because I called kso when I saw this I think Stags had posted it um first and I was just I was just driving back from a Jiu-Jitsu class and I saw it in my car when I got back home and I said hey well I'm GNA call KSL and just see what's up with this and they did um on at least I don't remember what her name was I'm don't even think I I don't think even think she told me the name but she was trying to justify this on the call and she talked about how they wanted to get reactions out of Their audience with this type of post and then I said so you would you do this with the Democrat side yeah you got to call out KLA Harris on juneth just to see if the Democrat Party gets angry or something like what uh but but she said she kept continuing saying but they didn't have a convention and they didn't have a debate this week which is it was like the week of the debate when this was posted and I said okay so how do you define the antics of the Republican party and this is she basically said to me that it was the rule change in the debate of the different Republicans in the primary which mute basically muted the moderators and I was saying that's what your antics are or that's how you're defining Antics for this post so that's what the conversation was like and I posted that and then where I hung up the phone because she forwarded me to her supervisor I got a voicemail and then a few minutes later then it CH then they put up the statement and changed it so why does the church even own KSL if it opens it up to this cuz like I got to be honest with you as a Los Angeles Mormon this just sounds like stupid Utah Republic party drama and it's I'm just like this this is lame it's stupid this sounds like the chatter around the water cooler of fat cat lady bureaucrats at the Salt Lake City DMV okay that's that's what this really sounds like which is not to be dismissive of uh Utah's politics I'm sure it's serious and important over there but at the end of the day how is this getting out on a church own news Outlet like like should the church just either either put 50 in interns on it like you do anything BYU releases like you do anything that the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints releases and have it be another sterile sterile super sanitized super nobody can be offended super middleof the road thing that's run to a very high journalistic standard okay so either do that and run it like a church thing or else just get rid of the dumb thing sell it to Time Warner Cable like can somebody be in a adult in the room and just make a decision here but at this point this is the second time in one month I've done a news article about some stupid left-wing woke thing that KSL the church-owned news outlet has done and it makes me think if I'm batting two stories a month on woke KSL it's effectively a tabloid what is this like The Daily Beast you know C can we just offload it do we have our own Vice news now or if we're going to be a TBL FL can KSL just like start following around Utah influencers and just getting paparazzo picks of them because it' be kind of cool to see quu L and then and analyzing you know whether he's wearing fresh new Nike heirs with his tasteful Ensemble you know like either are we going to have a church owned tabloid or not you know so what are the tea leaves man you guys know this stuff tell me what's going to happen I think I think and and we'll see if Tommy agrees with me on this or not but news is always biased like even if you just report it completely straight down the middle of the road you're still choosing what story is to report and which story is not to report yeah and so like you can say we're politically neutral but it would probably be better to say we strive to be politically neutral amongst our 75% Democrat Workforce or something like that not that and just like be upfront about it you know uh and I think that would would go along that would go more towards establishing credibility on this type of stuff than just saying like oh no we are just purely objectively politically neutral that's our standard and and pretending as if that's even a thing wow 100 never that 100% just doesn't ever happen like you can't be like you were saying politically neutral on everything even like I'd say this as someone who does news for a living it's not even just the slant of news it's like what's your choices and then also like your citations like what who are you looking to in order to get news from or your resources that Michael mes piece you say you do you do news for a living I was thinking you should do like ASMR bro you got a great soft voice like Bob Ross style like you shouldn't read the morning news like to get People Pumped up you should be doing like the midnight news like today did you know that something significant happened in Utah what happened was just calm them all yeah and you would just calm them all down and then they'd slowly drift asleep but be in the know and well informed you should do Utah ASMR news and you would probably get a 100,000 subs and be making easily six figures a year just like you know softly Bob rossing people to sleep and I got to tell you you'd make enough money you could probably buy a KSL because the way they're going there so I just want to get something straight here you're the guy you're the one that got the apology out of KSL I don't know if I am cuz the girl that I talk to is defensive the whole time the Republicans kind of gave an ultimatum to KSL like look this needs to come down it's clearly biased and they said they had to wait eight hours after KSL said yeah we're going to respond they waited eight hours before it finally came down and they only waited like 10 minutes after Tommy talked to them so like just based on that lied that we have Tommy you should own it you should own it just be like yeah that was me man that was me no I was I like I sent out that tweet and I'm thinking like was this actually me so I I like checked around with some people that I know that are kind of higher up and see if they talked to them and I I knew that the Republican Party had and I was thinking but they the people that I talked to said they hadn't really done anything okay but I'm still not sure if it was me okay the last question I just know that I called and that happened okay Luke Luke say a little live tutorial a little live tutorial about how how slanting happens in news so the way that the Salt Lake Tribune covered this was that they said that KSL came under Fire for saying that the Republican Party ran into tough times and then they put that are you tired of their Antics in the middle of the story ah whereas what I did what I did and this you could say this is like the W radio bias in the story was my headline was church own KSL News comes Under Fire issues apology for complaining about quote Republican party's Antics so I guess you could say I was a little more honest quote unquote about what it was that was explicitly partisan about their statement but then I guess my slant if you could call it that was kind of putting it on the church and kind of suggesting with my title that maybe the church shouldn't be involved with this kind of stuff so that's just kind of how you can take the same facts cover the story the same way but just the way that you present information gives your readers a different view of the story than other choices that you might have made and then and then soling tibute did this whole story about how Mike Lee did a poll if they would rather be waterboarded or have to read KSL every day they were like water boarding was introduced it's formally defined as a torture by the United Nations oh my God was introduced during the Iraq War and came into popular Consciousness when backlash against it happened during the Obama oh my gosh okay so then the last question here before I go what what's this mean I I mean I feel bad for the modern American Media establish right now establishment right now they used to make tons of money off of classifi before the internet and that was a major backbone to be able to afford all kinds of goodies like foreign correspondence people don't realize this but in every major country there was a correspondent for the New York Times that was getting in with local newspapers local officials local celebrities and Reporting on things that were happening in in in in France things were happening in Southeast Asia things were happening in Japan things were happening in Africa and it was practically a State Department job man you know like if you went to the Embassy in in Paris France you might end up rubbing shoulders with like an executive from deont and a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and and there was this um there was this kind of surplus of good information that would help you contextualize all of the information that you were receiving right and the public was more well- informed but then when all those classified went away Craigslist was introduced that major Revenue stream just came out from underneath the newspapers and the first thing to go was the foreign correspondence and then the second thing to go was really just kind of like national news that was not sensationalist and then the number one thing they had to augment was like Paparazzi and political garbage cuz that was what would get clicks and that was what would get views um in a system that they just utterly refused to adapt to and that's the reason why people like Tim pool and all these online news agencies were able to all get a huge rise out of people because they were actually doing the work that these old systems didn't want to convert to right so I I kind of feel bad for some of these Legacy establishments um but at the same time I want to know are you so strapped KSL that like maybe we need to talk to the church and give you some extra money so that you can run a more ethical ship and maybe hire some people to like make sure crap like this doesn't happen or do we just need to sell you off to the Tabloid companies so that we could just put your headline on that one article that one person writes in New York that ends up in like 55 different newspapers you ever noticed that that how like one article shows up on USA Today in like New York at 3 in the morning yeah and then all of a sudden like the local the Tennessee post has it word for word and you're like huh you know like all right so um is is that what we need to do like what do you you guys are media guys what's the what's the future of KSL are they just understaffed and crappy and either need to get fixed or sold off or is really this just demonstrative of an overwhelming leftist bias over there I think you probably have to get rid of it I think like you could try and balance out The Newsroom a little bit more but there's just so much of that bias in all of news these days and honestly if you started to try and do like quotas for no we don't have enough conservatives or Republicans and start explicitly trying to hire more then that kind of that gets in a whole other batch of problems of like wait so the church is discriminating against Democrats in their hiring practice is even if it's for like more balanced Newsroom it just creates a whole another batch of problems and I think it's just better for them to kind of get rid of it and honestly this is kind of the space that W radio is trying to fill is that W radio news specifically is trying to fill that was your vision for this carton was that you need a desert news you need a KSL news that it's actually going to be Pro church and actually try to be honest about what the biases are and be more of a Grassroots movement rather than this from the church above of a thing yeah like some kind of just oddly neoliberal Mitt Romney sanitized uh publicity uh Outlet hopefully be an actual kind of bottomup Grassroots news organization that at least just talks about what people really think instead of the sanitized version so um okay awesome well thank you guys for coming on anything we missed anything you want to say before we end it here anything want to say before we end it were you going to say something Tommy oh I was thinking that they have to adapt to the news as it is now kind of as Arden was saying that going on like doing live streams doing other stuff because kind of as you said before trying to fit news into into the older systems that all the news outlets have been doing it's just not working for them anymore I mean there's been massive layoffs in media all across the country with I think it was like the Washington Post several different Outlets that I know of personally uh they've all had a ton of layoffs so they have to adapt and they have to adapt quickly to what's been happening okay and before you go Tommy first off thanks for showing up post millennial represent what and second off is is that the vignette from the book of Abraham behind you there's a poster on your wall it looks like is are you just just like such a stand for the Papi of the book of Abraham that you straight up have yeah do you have the manuscript of the book of Moses behind you what is that no so that is the Declaration of Independence oh oh shoot I just hit my own light knock your light over if there's any question made leather yeah that's made oh dude that's cool yeah it's made of leather all right dude that's pretty hip so um yeah I think you can get it I mean this isn't a sh this isn't a planned Shadow but Savage gentlemen. comom I think they're actually based out of Utah and they made they make this and then some other stuff made out of leather like a punching bag and all sorts of clothes it's really good that is from them too and you just gave me an idea I have to make a piece of Ward radio merch that is the what's that come on the faximile of like faximile number three with like Abraham on the bench and everything like that but we have to make it like Brad and quu and Luke and then you know like little clay jar pots can be like I don't know Britney the lady show we should do like our own Egyptian papy of faximile number three on like this sick piece of leather that people can just like hang inside their dorms in college you got to admit that' be a pretty sick piece of merch right yes okay the top half represents the heavens were word radio resides the bottom half represents Mormon stories where John resides and little interpretations going down the side that is too good all right well guys please let us know what you guys think in the comments below is KSL going woke or do we not need to lay at the feet of conspiracy what can be laid at the feet of incompetence is this just incompetence of Legacy Media and is there a Brave New World ahead uh for news that maybe we fill or that somebody else could fill let us know what you guys think in the comments below if you guys haven't yet please make sure you check out Ward radio news by going to Ward radio.com and clicking right here on the very top you can see it news right next to the merch column and you'll be able to get all of the alerts that are um written by sorry all the alerts of the news post that are written by uh luk Hansen here and make sure you go to the bottom if you check out the bottom of Ward radio news not only can you contribute to the channel but you can sign up for our newsletter right there and get all of these articles in your very own inbox as soon as they come out and as always if you feel generous and you'd like to contribute to the show make sure you guys check us out on zel you can contribute there or on the cash app or venmo at w radio on both of those platforms and if you'd really like to support the channel make sure you check out Ward radio.com and buy a shirt for Merch or a super cool snapback hat just like this one as always guys this has been real and it's been fun it's been real fun for this and more please make sure you check us out at Ward radio.com this is going to be the best Best Day Ever this is going to be the best day ever wake up [Music]