Reissued: “Utah Politics: The Elephant in the Room”: Utah Politics from 1890s-1970s with Rod Decker (S1, E6 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
This is Brad Westwood. You're listening to Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. When you're looking forward, planning for the future, first examining carefully the past, this is the podcast that strives to do this for Utah. For all its diverse communities, and all of its communities geographically spread out across Utah. I want to thank Conner.
Conner is our engineer. Conner Sorenson is from Studio Underground, and he is both our sound engineer and our post-production editor. Thank you, Conner, for all the work you do. Thank you, Underground, for allowing us to use this wonderful studio for Speak Your Piece.
Our guest today is Rod Decker. Many of you, I'm sure remember Noel Rod Decker. He has been retired now. How many years now, Rod?

**Rod Decker** (1:05)
Two years.

**Brad Westwood** (1:07)
A long-time fixture in politics in Utah.
KUTV Channel 2 before that, the Deseret News. I think if people were to say, who can you get a straight story from? So many people say your name, Rod. Thank you. Why do you think that's the case? Why do you think people see you as a respected journalist?

**Rod Decker** (1:31)
I was around a long time.

**Brad Westwood** (1:35)
I think you also pretty well spoke candidly and openly and tried to make it as clear as possible.

**Rod Decker** (1:41)
Tried to make it as clear as I could.

**Brad Westwood** (1:44)
In the first podcast, we were talking about the history of education in Utah. In your book, you address education.
There is a kind of a constant conflict in Utah's legislature related to education. In this same period of time where you talk about the social and sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, there's also a great deal of development related to what's taught in school and so on. To take us there to the 60s and 70s, let's talk about where does this conflict start and can you explain it for us?

**Rod Decker** (2:30)
Utah's educational situation and the politics of education seem to me to be different from, but affected by Utah's cultural politics. The reason Utah is so strongly Republican, as I said before, is because Latter-Day Saints vote Republican and the reason they vote Republican is because Latter-Day Saints' resistance to American social change, particularly the sexual revolution and change in families. That isn't what's happened in education. In education, part of it is Utah's demography. Utah, for decades, had much the highest birth rate, much the youngest population, and much the largest number of school children for every taxpayer. So, to stay average, Utah had to pay more.
And Utah had more kids. Next, Utah has a mediocre economy. Utah's economy, Utah's per capita income, largely because it has so many children, is 82, 83%, something like that, of the national per capita income. Utah wages are lower, partly because Utah has a younger population.
You have a mediocre economy and a lot of kids, and it's hard for Utah to keep up. And it was hard for decades for Utah to keep up.
But then Republicans took over because of what I mentioned before, Latter-Day Saint resistance to American social change. Republicans took over Utah and they have made low education funding state policy. They've acted openly and sort of secretly to keep education funding down. Now, they don't have anything against education. They want good schools. They love education. They just love low taxes more and they keep taxes low and they keep education spending low.

**Brad Westwood** (4:50)
Rod, when I read through this book, I felt like I was reading through your entire career as well as before. I mean, you go back to the 1890s and around statehood and so on.
For someone who's been involved in journalism for 45 years, I want to ask you about one contemporary issue. I see very good journalists doing wonderful evidentiary, tracking evidence, corroborating sources, really gathering stories in a careful, methodical, professional way. Now I've also seen loose and wild journalism. Maybe it isn't journalism, maybe it's just public opinion that's on the web. But because of the web and because of the development over the last 20 years, I'd like to ask you, how do you see this world where people talk about fake news when in fact it's deeply corroborated? There's so much evidence that is presented and yet somehow because of this tribalism, people can just say simply it's fake news.
How do you reckon with that? What do you think? How does this portend for us in the future?

**Rod Decker** (6:15)
Well, there are lots of good journalists, as you say, who do lots of good work. I was in Vietnam and since Vietnam, I have held an opinion of a small minority that American mainstream news media are systematically biased.