He was an official for the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Utah Republican Party. As editor of The Deseret News, he published editorials condemning deficit spending, same-sex marriage and lenient alcohol laws.
So it was something of a head-scratcher, Mr. Cannon said, when his voice mail and e-mail started filling up with messages from people calling him a “liberal freak” for the sympathetic way his paper often writes about illegal immigrants.
“You have become a dangerous newspaper, one that I am on the verge of discontinuing,” wrote one outraged reader.