A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier. H.L. Mencken
By Michael Krieger: The saga surrounding American oligarch Sheldon Adelson’s purchase of Las Vegas’ largest newspaper, The Review-Journal, is turning into a murder-mystery of sorts, with the primary victim being the truth.
For nearly a week, the media and political worlds have been wondering who paid $140 million to purchase Nevada’s largest daily newspaper, The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The primary buyer had taken great pains to remain anonymous, but Fortune has learned from multiple sources familiar with the situation that it is Sheldon Adelson, chairman and CEO of casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp.The purchase was a significant and ominous development on multiple levels. First of all, the man admitted last year that he doesn’t like journalism, but nonetheless thought he should scheme with Israeli-American oligarch, and top Hillary Clinton donor, Haim Saban to purchase the New York Times to shift the paper’s coverage of Israel. From Haaretz:
What remains unclear is why Adelson has refused to come forward.
Clearly this isn’t a vanity play, and it’s also hard to imagine it as a financial investment (particularly given the steep price tag). What that leaves is political influence, particularly in a swing state like Nevada.That said, however, it would seem difficult to direct editorial coverage when the actual editorial writers are in the dark as to who signs their paychecks.
Saban and Adelson should buy The New York Times together in an effort to bring more “balance” to the newspaper’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East, Adelson suggested to wild applause. Adelson already owns Israel Hayom, a free Israeli newspaper widely seen as reflecting the positions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is considered close to Adelson, and, more recently, news website NRG and religious newspaper Makor Rishon.Moving along, the purchase of The Las Vegas Review-Journal has already claimed its first casualty.
“I don’t like journalism,” Adelson said, highlighting what he said was the media’s insistence on focusing on the empty half of the glass.
From CNN:
Mike Hengel, the top editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is stepping aside, less than two weeks after the family of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson took control of the newspaper.This clearly doesn’t bode well for the perception that the paper will spew anything but shameless Adelson propaganda, which is why the oligarch immediately launched into damage control mode by printing: A message from the new owners about the future of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. This message contains several pledges, with the most meaningful one being:
One reporter said the newsroom was “stunned” by the announcement, which Hengel made on Tuesday evening in the midst of a turbulent period for Nevada’s biggest newspaper.
Wednesday’s edition will include a message from the Adelson family on the front page. It says “we pledge to publish a newspaper that is fair, unbiased and accurate.” It describes plans for “new investments” and the establishment of an ombudsman.
Retaining the trust of readers will be difficult for the paper, especially if other veteran journalists follow Hengel to the exit.
A round of end-of-the-year buyouts were initiated before Adelson purchased the paper on December 10. Hengel was originally not eligible. But the eligibility rules were apparently changed for him.
According to tweets and people who were present for the announcement, Hengel told his staffers that he did not ask for a buyout, but that he was offered one shortly after the change in ownership. He did not say who made the offer. But he said he thought his relationship with the Adelson family would be “adversarial” and that it was best to let them pick their own editor.
Longtime Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith, who was once sued by Adelson, wrote over the weekend that “Adelson is precisely the wrong person to own this or any newspaper.”
In Las Vegas many of the biggest stories involve casinos, and Adelson owns the Venetian casino. “Readers will be inclined to filter every story through the knowledge that it’s being printed in an Adelson newspaper,” Smith wrote.
He’s worried about his colleagues, however. There are “plenty of well-founded concerns about whether the Adelsons will be kept at arms length from the newsroom,” DeHaven said.
On several occasions since the sale, management has removed or changed passages from stories relating to the sale, according to reporters at the paper and outside news accounts.
The Adelson family acquired the paper through a newly-formed company called News + Media Capital. The company’s manager, Michael Schroeder, who also runs a chain of small papers in Connecticut, declined to comment on the interventions.
Second, we pledge to publish a newspaper that is fair, unbiased and accurate. We decided to buy the Review-Journal to help create a better newspaper — a forward thinking newspaper that is worthy of our Las Vegas community. This journalism will be supported by new investments in services such as enhanced fact checking and a Reader Advocate or Ombudsperson to respond to reader concerns.Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, it’s almost certainly complete and total bullshit. For example, CNN noted the following:
While the sale was secretly in the works, several Review-Journal reporters were told to spend two weeks monitoring three local judges.So he’s already getting reporters to do his dirty work. Equally troubling, is the following paragraph from that same “message from the new owners”…
A separate story about the assignment was published on Friday. The takeaway was that the reporters were unknowingly keeping tabs on a judge that has been unfriendly to Adelson and his business interests in the past.
All three reporters agreed that the recent interference has been uncomfortable. But as DeHaven put it, “there’s not a lot we can do about it.”
“As our editors said, ‘We don’t own the press,'” he added.
These are the three principles that will guide our ownership of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. How will this all work over the coming weeks and months? The professionals at New Media, who are now managing the R-J as well as running more than 125 other daily newspapers nationwide, will continue to oversee all operations. Mike Hengel, the paper’s current editor, accepted a voluntary buyout offer from the R-J’s prior owners, an offer that was also made to other qualified employees. Other R-J employees also accepted the voluntary buyout offer from the previous owners. The New Media managers will appoint an interim editor and will immediately begin a search for the next permanent Review-Journal editor.Think about this for a moment. An American oligarch who spent more than anyone else on the 2008 Presidential election, who dislikes journalism and plots to buy newspapers in order to change their reporting bias is, “running more than 125 other daily newspapers nationwide.”
Even worse, he seems to exert tremendous influence on papers he doesn’t own, through his henchman Michael Schroeder. A perfect example being the extremely shady reporting recently discovered at the tiny Connecticut paper, The New Britain Herald. Before going forward, it’s key to understand the relationship between this paper and oligarch Adelson.
BoingBoing reports:
Adelson’s animus against District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez seems to stem from his interactions with her when she presided over Jacobs v. Sands, in which one of Adelson’s former employees has sued for wrongful dismissal after he blew the whistle on the business’s links to Chinese organized crime. When Adelson took the stand in that case, he refused to answer routine questions and argued with the judge who told him, basically, to shut up and do as he was told.So with that in mind, prepare to be blown away by the mind-boggling shadiness that just went down at The New Britain Herald. As reported by the Hartford Courant:
Subsequently, Adelson offered to back the campaign of anyone who could credibly run against the judge in upcoming elections.
The newspaper’s management objected to the assignment to snoop on the three judges, which came down without explanation from Gatehouse Media, the newspaper’s parent company. No major stories came of the all-hands project.
However, another paper, a tiny Connecticut paper called The New Britain Herald, ran a huge story on Gonzales and criticized her for her dealings with Adelson. The story was bylined by “Edward Clarkin” — a mysterious figure whose byline only appears one other time in the paper’s archives, for a review of a Polish restaurant. No one has been able to locate Clarkin, and the Herald refuses to discuss who he might be.
The Herald isn’t owned by Gatehouse, the company that Adelson bought. But Michael Schroeder, who owns Central Connecticut Communications, which owns the Herald, is the manager the Delware company that Adelson owns, through which he bought Gatehouse.
With a reporting staff that numbers in the single digits, the New Britain Herald still fills its pages seven days a week with city politics, police news, local sports and a variety of community topics from teen pregnancy to Christmas caroling.Of course he has no comment. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Now here’s some more.
Given its lean resources and hyperlocal focus, the Herald surprised some earlier this month by devoting an entire page to a lengthy exposition on business courts, including a 10-paragraph section criticizing the actions of a little-known judge three time zones away in Las Vegas.
That article, tucked on Page 12 of a Tuesday paper, is now shining an uncomfortable spotlight on the man who saved the Herald from extinction — publisher Michael Schroeder, who has a business relationship with Sheldon Adelson, a prominent casino operator who has clashed with the Las Vegas judge scrutinized in the Herald article.
Schroeder now finds himself caught up in a complex mystery at the intersection of politics, media and business — a mystery with a litany of unanswered questions, among them: Why would a local paper in New Britain devote so much space to dissecting the rulings of a county judge 2,288 miles away? And who is the mysterious “Edward Clarkin” whose name appears as the author of the Herald story?
Those questions have been swirling for days in journalistic circles, but they will not be answered by Schroeder. “I have no comment on our newsgathering, story selection or writers, as always,” Schroeder said in an email to The Courant.
Adelson, the Las Vegas Sands Corp. and a subsidiary, Sands China, are defendants in a 5-year-old lawsuit filed by a former employee who ran a Sands-owned casino on the Macau Peninsula, across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong. Presiding in that case: Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, who, according to reports in the Review-Journal, fined Sands China $250,000 this year for withholding documents in the case. She also dressed down Adelson during his testimony in the case, telling him, according to the Review-Journal: “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me. You understand that?”
That was in May. Six months later — not long before the sale of the Review-Journal was finalized — reporters there received what the paper would later describe as an “unusual assignment,” ordered by executives at GateHouse over the objections of the newsroom: “Drop everything,” the paper recounted, “and spend two weeks monitoring all activity of three Clark County judges.”
On the list of judges selected for scrutiny was Elizabeth Gonzalez.
The Review-Journal never published the reporters’ observations. But on Dec. 1, a 1,900-word story on business courts appeared on the other side of the country in the New Britain Herald, with a quarter of the story focused on Gonzalez. The story gave a detailed analysis of rulings the judge had made in Adelson’s lawsuit and another involving rival casino owner Steve Wynn, asserting that Gonzalez “has made rulings that appear inconsistent and even contradictory” between the two cases.
Harry Mazadoorian, a professor at Quinnipiac University School of Law and columnist for the Connecticut Law Tribune, remembers reading the story in the Herald and finding it an unusual choice for the local paper. “I would have expected that story on business courts to run in the Connecticut Law Tribune, instead of the Herald, where I didn’t think there’d be that much of an interest,” Mazadoorian said.
“And then I was surprised to see a quote from me.”
A third of the way down, the story states that Mazadoorian “notes that one way incompetent judges are dealt with is by reassignment to lower, less visible courts.” But Mazadoorian said Tuesday he was never contacted for the story and doesn’t know where that citation came from.
“I do a lot of writing and I don’t remember having said that,” Mazadoorian said. “I’m not saying I didn’t say it, but if I had to list my 100 top quotes, I don’t think that would make the list. It’s not the sort of thing I would say.”
Mazadoorian said he has been meaning to contact Schroeder, with whom he is friendly, to learn more about the story — and about the byline at the top: Edward Clarkin, Special to the Herald Press. “I still plan to talk to Mike and ask him who this guy is and where the story came from and how on earth he got a quote from me,” Mazadoorian said. “He certainly didn’t call me.”
That theme was repeated by others cited in the Herald article. Steve Arwood, chief executive officer of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, said a clipping service flagged the article based on a passage in which Arwood was quoted as saying: “The time new businesses spend ‘going through the system’ has been cut in half from only a few years ago, and that gives a competitive advantage.”
Arwood said he doesn’t know where that quote came from. “I saw this come through our clips and do not recall ever being interviewed and have no understanding of the issues and Michigan does not even have this type of [business-court] system,” Arwood said.
The article also says that Clarkin made “several calls to Gonzalez’s office asking for comment.” Mary Ann Price, court information officer for Clark County courts, said all media inquiries made to judges are redirected to her and recorded in an Excel spreadsheet she maintains. Price said she searched the spreadsheet and found no record of an inquiry by an Edward Clarkin or anyone from the New Britain Herald. She said Gonzalez’s office also has no record of a media inquiry.
Schroeder also declined to provide information about Clarkin, and tracking that individual down is no easy feat. There is no record of an Edward Clarkin in Connecticut on state voting rolls, property records, lawyer registries or various social-media sites, and several current and former newspaper employees said they never met anyone by that name.There should literally be a WARNING label on every single paper owned by Adelson. This guy is far worse than cigarettes.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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