The Salt Lake Tribune had an interesting story about their rival editor's talk at a conservative policy meeting in that city over the weekend.

Deseret Morning News editor Joe Cannon was one of the speakers at the GOP Council for National Policy meeting and agreed not to talk about what was said there. According to the report, Cannon was going to explain to attendees how newspapers work and local media scene.

If that's what Cannon was speaking on, I think this is much ado about nothing.

The things that trouble me about this situation are how Cannon became the editor of the Deseret Morning News with a near non-existent journalism background.

Cannon has been at his new career for only a few months. When he was named editor of the Morning News in December he had no previous journalism experience outside his 11 years on the LDS Church-owned newspaper's board.

He promised to keep his hands off political coverage at first because he had only recently stepped down as state GOP chairman. And he has maintained a fairly low profile since, although he sparked a controversy in April when he successfully asked his congressman brother to intercede to help the newspaper land an exclusive interview with Cheney during a Utah trip then.

Yep, it's the rarely acknowledged revolving door between politics and journalism. It doesn't just happen in Washington (read: George Stephanopolous, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Tony Snow, et cetera, ad infinitum).

But that's not really what the ethical complaints here were based on.

That Cannon promised council leaders he would not write about what was discussed should alarm his readers because he is shifting his loyalty from them to powerful government insiders, says Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, a nonpartisan journalism think tank.

"To have an editor agree to that [confidentiality] sends a really bad message that [journalists] are willing to play by their terms," McBride says. "And that our loyalties are with them and not with our audience. In letting [the council] set the rules and the agenda of who you can quote and who you can't quote - that says to the audience that these people are more important than you."

Is that the message that granting confidentiality really sends? Apply that to 99 percent of the media coverage coming out of Washington, D.C., for a millisecond. I'm not a big fan of anonymous sourcing, but spare me some of the melodrama.