Peggy Fletcher Stack’s Vendetta Against John Dehlin - Salt Lake Tribune - Mormon Stories 1511

Media Coverage and Accountability: Examining Peggy Fletcher Stack's Approach to Ex-Mormon Critics

When journalists cover religion, their editorial choices shape public understanding of faith communities and those who leave them. This principle becomes especially consequential when examining how major outlets frame stories about religious organizations and their critics. The question of whether prominent religion reporters maintain consistent editorial standards, and whether those standards themselves reveal bias, deserves serious examination. According to John Dehlin's December 2021 episode of the Mormon Stories podcast, this tension between journalistic integrity and selective sourcing has created a notable pattern in Salt Lake Tribune coverage of the ex-Mormon community.

Peggy Fletcher Stack has built a reputation as one of America's most persistent chroniclers of LDS Church institutional accountability. Her investigative work has consistently exposed financial discrepancies, institutional failures, and harm to vulnerable populations. This track record is significant, and her contributions to transparency in religious journalism remain substantial. Yet Dehlin's documented concerns suggest that Stack's editorial approach may contain an inconsistency worth examining: her willingness to cover certain critics while marginalizing others.

The Pattern of Source Selection

Dehlin's podcast episode meticulously catalogs a specific editorial pattern. Stack reportedly maintains strong professional relationships with progressive, faith-believing scholars and observers, sources who remain within or sympathetic to the institutional LDS framework. However, when covering ex-Mormon critics and activists, particularly those who question fundamental truth claims about the religion itself, Stack allegedly demonstrates less inclination to solicit their perspectives or grant them platform space.

This distinction matters methodologically. A religion journalist's choice of sources inherently shapes narrative framing. If only faithful progressives and institutional critics are interviewed about matters affecting ex-Mormons, readers receive an incomplete portrait of the community's actual composition and concerns.