An explanation to our readers
 
By Charley Najacht
Custer County Chronicle
 
Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 3, I was sitting down to eat an evening meal when I received a phone call from Rapid City Journal reporter Bill Harlan who was working the night shift. The reporter quizzed me about an e-mail news release he had just received from Frank Carroll of Custer who represented a group called the South Dakota Office of the Mormon Anti-Defamation League (MADL). Carroll was condemning statements I made in an Aug. 29 editorial about the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) compound near Pringle. Specifically, Carroll charged that I failed to differentiate between the FLDS and Mormons. I told Harlan I had not seen the news release, but thought I had not mixed the two in my editorial. The same release was on our computer at the newspaper the next morning, way after our weekly deadline.

For some reason in his MADL news release, Carroll also said I was a retired Army major who served in Bosnia. I don’t know what that had to do with the issue and it was incorrect information anyway. We set the record straight with him later. My retired Army National Guard rank is colonel and at one time long ago I was an infantry rifle platoon leader in Vietnam. Harlan admitted he had not read my editorial. He said he would have to hunt it up in the Journal newsroom. I asked him if he had read the stories my wife had written that same week concerning a Canadian woman’s attempts to visit her daughter at the compound. Again, he said he had not. Harlan said it was the Journal’s policy not to do anything with stories written in other newspapers. I said I knew Carroll was a Mormon and that he was concerned about us lumping the Mormons and the FLDS together. We ran a story last year on the difference between the two.

The FLDS believes it is the only true Mormon church that adheres to the original teachings of founder Joseph Smith regarding polygamy and blood atonement. They call themselves Mormons, too, whether the mainstream church recognizes them or not.

The next thing I knew Harlan had placed a story on the Journal’s Mount Blogmore internet site titled "A war of words in Custer: FLDS v. LDS." So much for the Journal’s policy. Harlan said “Mormons in Custer are angry with the weekly Custer County Chronicle about its coverage of a secretive, renegade sect that had a compound near Pringle. Harlan said we were conducting "an old-fashioned, small-town newspaper crusade to shed light on the FLDS in Custer County." Harlan said Carroll claimed we "unfairly lump together the fundamentalist group with the mainstream church.v Carroll told Harlan it was "insulting and it’s damaging."

Carroll said, "Mr. Najact (sic) has been asked repeatedly by local Church members to stop his campaign of sectarian division and bigotry aimed at the Mormon Church." Carroll is the only person I know locally to be a Mormon and it was he, and he alone, who expressed concern last year about us mixing his church up with the fundamentalist group at Pringle. "We have repeatedly asked Mr. Najacht to desist....,v Carroll went on to say. That is not true; we have always identified the FLDS as the FLDS. However, every time an article is printed in our paper about the FLDS, Carroll has been concerned that readers will confuse the two sects. Bigotry has certainly never been an issue.

Then Harlan pulled the only paragraph out of our Aug. 29 editorial, ("Human rights being violated") where we referred to vMormon doctrine.v In every other instance we had made a clear distinction, but Harlan chose to pull this one paragraph out and tell his blog readers, "Charley told me tonight he thought the Chronicle had clearly distinguised (sic) between the LDS and FLDS, but did he?" Harlan says, vFrank doesn’t think so,v and quotes Carroll saying, "This is just unwarranted attack on mormon church by a local newspaper editor." Harlan was fanning the flames.

Then, in a Saturday, Sept. 15, Journal column, Harlan writes about us again under the title, "Precision important when it comes to prejudice," implying that we are somehow being prejudicial in this matter of FLDS and Mormons. He again brings up the fact that I referred to "Mormon doctrine" in my editorial and that I did not differentiate between the two sects.

Frankly, I think both reporter Harlan and the local Mormons are missing the point of all of this. We, at the "small-town" Chronicle are trying to shine the spotlight on what we believe are blatant human rights violations occurring in Custer County at the secretive FLDS compound near Pringle. I told the Journal reporter that we feel as if we are walking on point down this trail and "you know what happens sometimes to people walking point." In this case, some have chosen to go after the messenger.

He made my point by taking pot shots at us. Instead of checking out our charge of human rights violations at the compound, Harlan saw fit to pile on with the local Mormons. the activities of FLDS members at Pringle is the issue, not us. We apologize if in our zeal to get this story out we have offended anyone. By the way, as quickly as it was formed, the two-man MADL has been disbanded at 415 Montgomery Street in Custer.

If what we are doing is "conducting an old-fashioned, small-town newspaper campaign," so be it. Better us than nobody. It would be nice if some other people would pay as much attention to what activities are going on at the FLDS compound in Pringle as to what we publish in our newspaper.

We felt we owed this explanation to some of our readers who may have been confused by what they may have read about us recently on the Journal’s blog site or in the newspaper itself last Saturday. As often happens in cases like this, attention is diverted from the real issue at hand.
 
CusterCountyNews.com
Originally published Wednesday, September 12, 2007
 
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