While there, he anchored Good Morning Utah[5] and covered the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the murder of Lori Hacking, the death of former President Ronald Reagan and the fugitive stories of polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs.
Along with Jordan Whitney, Cowan won a local Rocky Mountain Emmy Award in 2008 for editing a piece called Emo Culture.
[6] Cowan was nominated alongside coworkers Robbin Simmons, Dianna Reed and Chris Volz for the 2008 and 2009 Suncoast Regional Emmy Awards but they failed to win any prizes.
[17] The film becomes a "therapeutic journal" in which Cowan processes his grief while critically examining his own role in sensationalizing the news in search of ratings and the furtherance of his professional ambitions.
[15] The second half of the film follows Cowan seeking to fill the void left in Wesley's wake by raising money to build a schoolhouse for an impoverished rural community in Kenya.
[16][17] It depicts Cowan as a humanitarian whose trauma caused him to evolve as a person, highlighting his efforts to save children from violence which followed Kenya's December 2007 election.
The Mormon Proposition, began in 2008 as an exploration of suicide among homeless gay teenagers in Salt Lake City, but wound up focusing on the support of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) for California's Proposition 8, a successful popular referendum banning same-sex marriage which Cowan called "one of the largest ballot-measure shams in the history of the United States".
[19][21] Cowan funded the film by taking out a second mortgage on his home and running up tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, with Bastian providing the remainder.
[19][21][24][27] Asked at Sundance why he created the film, Cowan answered, "Really, my personal reason…is the fact that I was a kid in Roosevelt, Utah, who knew what it was like to be called a ‘faggot’ every day.
"[22][21] Debruge objected that LDS Church elders' voices had been distorted and their faces shown in unflattering closeups as they discussed homosexuality and religious freedom.
[24] While sympathetic to its overall direction, Knegt criticized what he called "downright bizarre choices in sound and stock footage to laughable recreated sequences" and deemed its use of music overly aggressive and manipulative of the audience.
[24] Tim Plant of Metro Weekly, a Washington, D.C.–based magazine oriented towards LGBTQ+ readers, concluded, "While Cowan ably creates an effective narrative, the technical aspects of the documentary don’t live up to the same standards.
Rudimentary editing, unnecessary graphics during transitions, and overuse of the same stock footage (there are only so many times we can watch money being counted), reduces the production to a lower quality than the story.
"[19] In April 2021, Cowan demanded $20 million from Toronto-based WE Charity for the "destruction of his character and marketability as a journalist, public speaker, filmmaker and author," stating that if they did not pay he would use his position as an anchorman with Sinclair Broadcast Group to destroy their reputation.
[29][30][31] Journalism professor and media ethics specialist Mary Hausch of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas commented that Cowan's threats breached established standards requiring journalists to avoid conflicts of interest.