![]() The R-J and Sun are the only dailies in Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, its sprawling suburbs, and nearly three-quarters of the state’s population. There aren’t a lot of alternatives to the R-J when it comes to local news in Nevada. The state’s most prominent political writer, Jon Ralston, quit his Sun column in 2012 when Greenspun killed a column he’d written criticizing Reid. The Sun’s owner, Brian Greenspun, is a friend of the Clintons with a long track record of quashing negative coverage of his friends and promoting his political allies. The same can’t be said for the Las Vegas Sun, the city’s other quasi-daily (and where I also worked, from 2004 to 2006), which is delivered, in a quirky joint-operating agreement, as a section of the R-J. I wrote the stories I thought were important, and no editor or higher-up ever tried to slant them I would have quit if they had. I can honestly say that none of this affected the paper’s news coverage of politics in my time there. The paper has long had one of the country’s most libertarian-conservative editorial pages-the opinion writers crusaded against Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid for years, to little apparent effect-and when I worked there it was owned by the Stephens family of Arkansas, which at the time was the largest single donor to the right-wing Club for Growth. On the one hand, the R-J’s reporting staff has proven its integrity and independence in its campaign for transparency and its tough coverage of the sale, which succeeded in exposing Adelson in a matter of days. If I were still an R-J reporter, I’d be nervous.īut so far, there are far more questions than answers about how Adelson plans to use his new vehicle. Smith kept fighting, and the suit was eventually dismissed. Smith, driving him into bankruptcy at a time when Smith’s young daughter was being treated for brain cancer. In one notable case, he sued a beloved R-J columnist, John L. Adelson, who gives few interviews, has a history of hostile relations with the local and national press. ![]() The prospect of Adelson-the world’s 18th-richest person, who has given tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes and enjoys access and influence at the highest levels of GOP as a result-owning a major piece of the media has provoked understandable anxiety among local and national political watchers, particularly on the left. In Thursday’s paper, the Adelson family published a notice saying they had purchased the paper “through a wholly-owned fund, as both a financial investment as well as an investment in the future of the Las Vegas community,” and that it was “always our intention to publicly announce our ownership.” (I worked at the R-J for three and a half years, serving as the paper’s Vegas-based political writer from 2006 to 2009.)įinally, on Wednesday, the mystery was solved. The paper’s own reporters publicly decried the lack of transparency, and set to work investigating the matter. Speculation swirled over the weekend, quickly centering around Sheldon Adelson, the shadowy right-wing billionaire who serves as chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands casino empire. Who would pay way too much for a random local broadsheet in a financially troubled industry? It would have to be someone whose goal wasn’t to make money, but to control a major apparatus of the Las Vegas media.
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