WOW... Things are a chang'n...
Apr 12th 2012 by Rabecca Walsh, Salt Lake City Magazine.
Utahns of any age can mark time by KSL anchors and weather forecasters—Bob Welti, Paul James, Dick Nourse. 
They were the dependable characters of bedtime, sandwiched between Love Boat and the Tonight Show. No need to turn the channel.
But now, like Capt. Stubing and Carson, Eyewitness News is passé. Nielsen TV ratings from February sweeps reinforced a cosmic shift in local couch potato habits: Channel 5, the station owned by The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and do I really need to
add, the preferred news source of the Mormon faithful?) has slipped into
third place, behind KUTV-Channel 2 and KSTU-Channel 13. (Those heathen channels, my words, not Rebecca Walsh's)
One should never read too much into Nielsen ratings, or television
news for that matter, but KSL’s decline does raise a question: Is Utah
becoming…(how to put this) more diverse?
About the same time Channel 5 salespeople got the bad news about the
rates they can charge advertisers, Gallup released its annual
“religiosity” study. Utah came in second—behind
Bible-thumping Mississippi. Beehive Staters are no slouches; 57 percent
are “very religious.” But still, No. 2 has got to be disappointing (and
undermines the company line that two out of three Utahns is a
church-going Mormon).
Meantime, a group of gay students at Brigham Young University joined
the “It Gets Better” campaign with a video of their own. And BYU
spokeswoman Carri Jenkins actually told CNN
they won’t be summarily expelled for the their honesty because the
current, kinder-gentler interpretation of the school’s honor code is
“based on conduct, not on feeling, and if same-gender attraction is only
stated, that is not an honor code issue.”
Back in the day, free speech was enough to get a feminist professor fired and a student’s diploma held hostage.
But these, apparently, are different times.
And then this: The news that even GOP Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the flock’s “White Horse,” isn’t collecting
nearly the campaign contributions from fellow churchgoers that he did
four years ago. Beehive Staters’ donations to the former Massachusetts
governor and self-described savior of the 2002 Winter Games have been
cut in half.
What’s next: The Apocalypse?
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