There is a serious story about the Prince house on the hill, mainly about conflicting zoning rules and how those get resolved. But the other one is way more fun. The Wall Street Journal reporter told me as much.
Fluffy Sasha and Mocha down at the Egyptian for pets? That’s fun, great fodder for the Follies, also kind of brilliant, right?
I looked up their human, Eric Hermann, for fun and was surprised by a couple of things. One, he was notorious himself for an instant over a dozen years ago when his activities brought about change in the British court system. And two, none of the important press has stirred this easy background into their stew full of castles on high, spatting among the wealthy, settling who’s the big bad neighbor, dogs and walls and all.
According to the BBC back then: “Mr. Hermann is known in the finance business as a debt ‘vulture.’ He and his associates buy up the debt of the poorest nations on the planet, usually for pennies on the dollar, then sue or use other means to squeeze the nations to pay ten times, even a hundred times, what the vulture fund paid for the debt.”
From The Guardian, in a story about Hermann and a partner: “Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win debt relief from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets.”
They sued through the British courts until Great Britain put a stop to it. There was a fair amount of outrage then at him and others like him.
Sounds at least as delectable for a certain kind of reporting as directed at the villainous co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a cybersecurity and connectivity company that has exploded in value since launching in 2009, helping Ukraine and effectively shutting down 8Chan along the way.
Forbes now ranks Matthew Prince the second richest person in Utah (“richest man!”). Of course, it is Utah. That puts him at 949 on the list this year for the United States. Still, not shabby if a bit short of generating the ohmygod reaction sought over and over and over again by headline writers having their fun.
Hermann isn’t exactly poverty stricken himself, of course. He and his wife, Susan, own a residential complex off Sampson Avenue whose mushroom-like sproutings above ground, as if unconnected houses, alone dwarf what the Planning Commission approved for the Princes next door.
Seems the “sprawling!” and “massive!” headlines miss by a couple of hundred feet. That’s fun.
Anyway, the Hermanns don’t like the plans, obviously. Eight others who signed on to their appeal don’t like them, either.
Coverage of the house and the feud between the ski town titans has been described with varying degrees of breathless inaccuracy, innuendo and incompleteness by the larger press having fun, Bloomberg the most knowingly adrift. It all has the feel of middle school, entertainment like “Mean Girls.”
One small big-press goof is characterizing the eight others as “neighbors.” Indeed, three have homes in the neighborhood, while the rest are from other parts of town, one outside the city proper near Kimball Junction.
Fun fact: Ten letters of support for the proposal come from the immediate neighborhood, including representatives of two homes the Princes own. Bloomberg pointed out that, shockingly, one of those supportive neighbors is a longtime friend of Matthew Prince. A billionaire with a friend? Is that even allowed?
Less fun than ferreting out the existence of a friend on the block — though easy enough to find in the dry documents and recordings of the meetings — is that the new home would have a slightly lower profile on balance than the two homes there now. It would be too banal to include that duff, obviously, and not an easy fit with the narrative.
So basically, one rich dude is the villain, the other the vulture. And we’re all sucked into all this fun a la “Dallas,” “Dynasty” and “Yellowstone.”
Ah, that’s it! I get it now. “Park City”! This is a show, the trope serving as script, reporters taking their cues, a break for everyone from the news, the serious news anyway.
OK, I’m kind of loving it, this mostly stupid fun stuff that accounts for the nation’s (sort-of) bigtime journalists not managing to get half the story, and what they do get, well, half of that is all wrong.
Laugh now, I guess, because what it says more seriously about journalism today ain’t so hilarious, especially when the editors get rolling with their earnest “democracy dies in darkness” stuff. Their own reporters don’t believe that tripe, busy as they are having fun.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.