Curious deal for Las Vegas newspaper
Curious deal for Las Vegas newspaper
[...] a few weeks ago, Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul and Republican party benefactor, was better known for suing newspapers than owning them.
Adelson, the chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., has sued the Daily Mail, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal for defamation.
Subsequently, a small Connecticut paper owned by Schroeder, the New Britain Herald, published a critical article about the judge that used fabricated quotations and had the byline of a person who does not appear to exist.
“The purchase of the Review-Journal signals a tectonic shift in the political landscape of Las Vegas and Nevada and has the potential to reverberate all the way to the White House,” Review-Journal columnist John Smith wrote last week.
The Adelson Family Foundation has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial support to JNS.org, a Jewish news service based in the United States, according to public records.
A veteran reporter at the Bristol Press, another Connecticut paper owned by Schroeder, announced his resignation on Thursday in a Facebook post, accusing Schroeder of “journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.”
Some observers say that Adelson might use the Nevada paper to promote his political allies and protect his extensive gambling interests in Las Vegas, which include the Venetian and Palazzo hotels, and the adjoining Sands Expo convention center.
Burnett says the board’s agents regularly monitor gambling companies, and licensees are bound by state regulations barring them from engaging in anything that “might reflect discredit on the state.”
Adelson’s interest in the Review-Journal stretches back to February, when a company named New Media Investment Group bought the newspaper and several smaller publications for $102.5 million in cash.
Late that month, a Delaware limited liability company called News and Media Capital Group was formed that served as the shell company through which Adelson’s family acquired the Review-Journal.
In early November, three reporters at the Review-Journal said they were instructed by the paper’s corporate managers to spend days observing three judges and their courtroom behavior.
About that time, an executive of New Media Investment Group contacted the editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, another newspaper it owns, and suggested that he send reporters to Las Vegas to investigate possible corruption among judges there.
[...] two people quoted in the article said they never spoke to a person by that name and that quotations attributed to them were fabricated.
To deal with the fallout from its Review-Journal purchase, the Adelsons have hired Mark Fabiani, a crisis communications specialist who has previously worked in the Clinton White House and for the cyclist Lance Armstrong.
Michael Reed, chief executive of New Media Investment Group, the company that sold the paper, said in an e-mail it “did nothing wrong or inappropriate with regard to this specific topic.”
On Christmas Day, Steve Collins, the Bristol Press reporter who quit amid accusations of journalistic misconduct by his paper’s publisher, Schroeder, received a $5,000 award from a nonprofit run by Jeremy Stone, son of investigative journalist I.F. Stone.