Paul Huntsman’s persevering with efforts to analyze the man who defeated his brother have unsettled many in the Tribune’s newsroom. Several journalists — who requested to not be named, to keep away from working afoul of Huntsman — are involved the chairman’s actions are an outgrowth of a purported rivalry between Cox and Huntsman’s household, one of the wealthiest and most outstanding in the state. Some consider the newsroom’s independence is compromised by the very existence of Huntsman’s investigative firm, which he named Jittai, utilizing a Japanese phrase that may imply “true state” or “actual condition.”
The Tribune has used Jittai’s findings in a number of news studies, and Huntsman has written two columns describing his causes for beginning the firm.
In an interview with The Washington Post, the chairman strongly denied utilizing his firm or the newspaper for his brother’s behalf, and stated Jittai’s objective was to show mismanagement and corruption in the state public well being system. Some of the firms Jittai has sought to analyze have raised the identical concern. “I’m shocked,” Huntsman stated. “Given how big these issues are, all they can come up with is to take a potshot at my brother Jon.”
Huntsman is a one thing of a hero amongst journalists in Salt Lake City. His household funding belief purchased the financially troubled Tribune in 2016 and three years later transformed it into the first nonprofit metropolitan newspaper in the United States, with Huntsman serving as chair of an 11-person governing board. He stated the Tribune has since used tax-deductible grants and public donations to assist stabilize its funds.
But Huntsman’s management has typically brought about friction in the newsroom. The paper’s prime editor, Jennifer Napier-Pearce, resigned in August 2020, a number of weeks after the Republican gubernatorial major ended and some months after Huntsman stated he created Jittai. She cited “differences of opinion” with Huntsman about “newsroom coverage, management and policies.”
People inside and outdoors the paper interpreted Napier-Pearce’s departing feedback as a veiled criticism of Huntsman’s alleged involvement in marketing campaign protection. “I have heard there was displeasure from the top at our coverage of the campaign [and] she was the human shield that insulated us from that,” Tribune columnist Robert Gehrke wrote on Twitter at the time. “Our reporters were pros and did their jobs.”
Napier-Pearce finally grew to become a Cox spokeswoman and senior adviser. She and the governor’s workplace each declined to remark for this report.
Huntsman stated he “always kept an arm’s-length relationship” with the Tribune’s news employees when it got here to protection involving his brother Jon, who was Utah’s governor from 2005 to 2009, served as U.S. ambassador to Russia and China, and ran for president in 2012 earlier than making an attempt to retake the governor’s workplace in 2020.
Paul Huntsman stated he shaped Jittai that yr, a while earlier than his brother conceded to Cox in July, utilizing a number of hundred thousand {dollars} of his personal cash. He did so, he stated, as a result of he didn’t really feel the Tribune’s 80-member newsroom had the depth and experience to deal with the document searches concerned in investigating the state’s testing contracts.
“There’s a lack of financial fluency” amongst the news employees, Huntsman informed The Post. “This story requires expertise in securities fraud, health-care fraud. It requires technical and scientific knowledge. … I’d like to see [reporters] broaden their skill sets. This is moving beyond liberal-arts degrees.”
With a few years of expertise working the Huntsman household’s funding portfolio, he stated, “it was more natural, based on my background, to get in and do it myself. We could do it much faster than turning it over” to the newsroom.
He stated Jittai — which has no full-time employees or common payroll however contracts with legal professionals for its tasks — has filed a whole bunch of requests underneath state public-records legislation for paperwork about the testing program Cox managed, in addition to comparable packages in different states. The firm additionally alleged in a lawsuit final yr that Cox illegally delayed entry to public paperwork associated to Utah’s pandemic response.
Huntsman has vowed to make the findings public. Some of the information Jittai has dug up has already made its means into the newspaper he chairs.
Lauren Gustus, who succeeded Napier-Pearce as editor, acknowledged that the Tribune has used information from Huntsman’s firm. But, she stated, “we have treated [Jittai] as a source, independently verifying those public documents by requesting them ourselves.”
Among at the very least 4 Tribune articles that used Jittai’s materials was one revealed final yr about the lead contractor for Utah’s coronavirus testing program, Nomi Health, and a subcontractor that noticed its inventory worth and income surge regardless of supplying coronavirus assessments of questionable accuracy.
That story — together with follow-ups, together with one looking for donations to the newspaper — didn’t point out Jittai’s involvement in the reporting. Huntsman disclosed his firm’s position in a column a month later. (Gustus stated Friday that the newspaper would add notes to earlier tales that didn’t point out Jittai.)
In an open letter to the Tribune’s newsroom final month, Nomi chief govt Mark Newman accused Huntsman of making an attempt to “re-litigate” his brother’s election loss.
“There is a line between healthy skepticism required to hold public institutions accountable and outright self-serving, special-interest cynicism designed to advance ulterior motives,” he wrote. “We believe your team in the newsroom needs to separate itself immediately from Paul Huntsman and his special unit of writers, litigators and publicists.”
Huntsman insisted the state’s contracting and testing issues transcend any political rivalry.
He stated he began the investigatory effort to revive “trust and integrity” and “transparency” to the state’s contracting procedures, which he stated have been riddled with opacity, cronyism and different unhealthy practices throughout the rush to confront the pandemic.
Questions about the design and implementation of the state’s program, often called CheckUtah, predate Huntsman and Jittai’s involvement. Tribune reporters started following the story early in the pandemic; a report revealed in May 2020, for instance, highlighted the rush to award greater than $84 million in no-bid contracts. “Lawmakers and whistleblowers are increasingly demanding answers about how the state awarded lucrative contracts and stewarded taxpayer dollars during the emergency,” the article stated.
As Huntsman wrote final summer time in a column disclosing Jittai’s founding, “I am a Utah taxpayer who is not amused when the state government and the private sector misuse public funds, some of which I believe went to private gain.”
Gustus stated neither Huntsman nor anybody else on the Tribune’s board has ever directed the paper to publish an article, or reviewed a narrative earlier than it was revealed. She portrayed Jittai as simply one other supply of information.
“Would I love to have more folks on our team who can do this kind of reporting?” she requested. “Absolutely.”
Nevertheless, the Tribune’s journalists have currently been in a position to push the testing story ahead on their very own. On Thursday, the newspaper broke news that federal investigators had concluded flawed work by the state’s testing program posed “an imminent threat” to public well being. It reported that an inspector had discovered “contaminated” take a look at kits on a laboratory desk subsequent to yogurt, rice muffins and a bag of Cheez-Its.
None of the reporting in that story relied on information from Jittai.