Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

In Adelson’s newsroom, Review-Journal staff sees looser purse strings and tighter leash

Nevada Newspaper Owner

Isaac Brekken / The New York Times

Jennifer Robison, who left the Las Vegas Review-Journal for a job in corporate communications, is given press plates from the story she reported about the paper’s owners at a farewell party May 20, 2016, in Las Vegas. At the Las Vegas paper now owned by the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, current and former employees cite untenable editorial oversight, particularly of coverage related to Adelson.

Click to enlarge photo

Craig Moon, center, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and Glenn Cook, its managing editor, attend a high school journalism awards banquet in Las Vegas, May 20, 2016.

In late January, about a half-dozen reporters from The Las Vegas Review-Journal gathered at a colleague’s apartment after work.

An article about a long-running lawsuit against Sheldon G. Adelson, the paper’s new owner, had just been cut in half for the print edition on orders from the top editor, and the reporters were disturbed by what they considered editorial interference. With two other colleagues conferenced in, they discussed the possibility of a byline strike.

“There was a lot of frustration, a lot of venting,” Jennifer Robison, a reporter who was at the meeting, recalled in a recent interview. “I remember someone talking about ordering a pizza but nobody was in the mood for anything like that.”

The byline strike never materialized. But the hastily arranged meeting underscored simmering tensions in a newsroom experiencing a tumultuous transition under new ownership.

With newspapers struggling to survive, it is not uncommon for wealthy businesspeople to step in and buy them — Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post, for instance, and John Henry with The Boston Globe. Each case presents potential conflicts in covering the owner’s businesses, as well as concerns that the owner might attempt to influence coverage.

The problem is particularly acute for The Review-Journal. Adelson, chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., is a casino magnate, a powerful Republican donor, a patron of education and a fierce defender of Israel, and his myriad interests present an almost singular example of how aggressive journalism can collide with the pursuits of a paper’s owner.

That new dynamic has roiled the ranks of the newsroom, creating a divide between top editors who see it as part of their job to review coverage of Adelson, and staff members who chafe at what they perceive as inappropriate interference. In the nearly six months since Adelson purchased the paper, at least a dozen journalists have quit, been fired or made plans to leave soon; many cite a strained work environment and untenable oversight, in particular regarding the coverage of a bitter legal dispute related to Sands’ operations in Macau.

There are advantages to having a billionaire as an owner, staff members agree. The newspaper has hired reporters and a graphic artist, and is upgrading its videography and photography equipment. Some employees, including Robison, have been given pay raises. A broken sewer pipe under the building has been fixed. Recently, the paper bought drones to use for news coverage.

“We’re doing a lot of investment in this newspaper, in the people,” Craig Moon, the new publisher, said. “Not only do we want it to be a great place to work but also a great newspaper and a great website.”

Moon and Glenn Cook, the managing editor, say neither Adelson, 82, nor his associates review articles or direct news coverage. “There’s never been any type of correspondence or information or calls from the Adelsons to do anything at this newspaper,” Moon, who reports directly to the Adelson family, said in a telephone interview.

In his first extensive comments on his ownership, provided in written responses to questions from The New York Times, Adelson said his family bought The Review-Journal “as a financial investment” and hoped to improve its profitability. “We believe it’s important that our Las Vegas community has a strong, growing, financially sound newspaper,” he said.

Still, current and former staff members describe a newsroom in which employees are mistrustful of top management — a wariness that began with the secret sale of the paper to Adelson in December and was amplified by the handling of articles related to his family and business interests.

“Morale was already not great, but when Sheldon acquired the paper it was like a boom got lowered,” Robison said. “People would literally joke about, ‘What’s going to happen if Sheldon buys the paper?’ So when he actually did, it was this bizarre feeling, it was just surreal.”

After 11 years at The Review-Journal, Robison left Friday for a job in corporate communications. James G. Wright, a deputy editor, plans to leave in June. Another staffer who has departed is John L. Smith, a longtime columnist who filed for bankruptcy in 2007 while defending himself against a libel lawsuit brought by Adelson. After the casino magnate bought the paper, Smith was told by upper management that he was barred from writing about Adelson and another casino owner, Steve Wynn.

Among the others who have left are two reporters who covered areas aligned with Adelson’s interests: gambling and stadium subsidies.

“There’s no doubt about it — it’s disappointing; I’ve been sorry to see every one of them go,” Cook said in a telephone interview. “But we’re going to replace them.”

Wright, Robison, Smith and Stephanie Grimes, a features editor who was fired this month, spoke on the record for this article, as did several of the paper’s current leaders. Nearly a dozen other current and former employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from Adelson, who in the past has sued journalists who portrayed him negatively.

Robison said there was not a “big epiphany” moment that made her decide to leave. “It’s been kind of gradual as I’ve watched things change,” she said. “I feel like I can work there for as long as I want, but if I do, I’m going to cross a line I didn’t know existed.”

The Review-Journal is Nevada’s largest newspaper, with a print circulation of about 100,000. From a squat brick building near a freeway interchange known as the “Spaghetti Bowl,” its newsroom staff of roughly 100 covers topics central to the city and the state. For decades, those included the many business, political and personal interests of Adelson.

Then suddenly in December, the paper’s employees discovered that they worked for Adelson; in fact, their reporting uncovered his ownership after he secretly purchased the paper for $140 million through a Delaware-based limited liability company managed by an unknown Connecticut newspaper owner.

The clandestine sale upset many employees and raised concerns about whether Adelson would use the paper to advance his own agenda. (Adelson owns a newspaper in Israel, Israel Hayom, which has been accused of being a mouthpiece for the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.)

Within two months of the sale, the paper’s top executives were replaced. Moon, a former executive at Gannett, took over as publisher. Cook, a senior editorial writer at the newspaper, was interim editor-in-chief until the role was filled in February by J. Keith Moyer, a former publisher of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

When he was named interim editor, Cook said, he decided that he would review all articles related to Adelson and his business interests. Now, the protocol is that both he and Moyer review such articles, Cook said.

Adelson said he “didn’t ask for the policy” but believed it was appropriate. “I hope the people in charge are fact-checking to ensure that whatever is written about me or my family or my interests is fair,” he said.

Wright, Robison and others say they think that top editors are not just reviewing articles, but trying to shape them in ways that make them more favorable to Adelson.

“The tipping point for me was at the point where every day I was being asked to do things that made me feel uncomfortable — that took me farther away from doing what I would consider quality journalism and more into the realm of presenting things in tune with the owner’s other interests,” Wright said. He is leaving next month for a yearlong journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Moyer was traveling last week and was not available for comment. Cook said: “Keith and I simply want to make sure that our coverage is beyond reproach and is as fair as it can possibly be. We recognize that, especially in the eyes of some people, we’re never going to get it right.”

Journalists say they have become accustomed to periods of calm in the newsroom interrupted by flare-ups; Wright, Robison and others describe a strained, and at times adversarial, relationship with the paper’s new leaders. After Smith, the columnist, resigned in April, Moyer held a meeting and effectively told reporters that if they were unhappy with his decisions, they could quit.

Immediately after the sale, there was a kind of “we’re in this together” mentality. But now, with so many departures, that sense of connection to the newspaper has largely disappeared.

“Most of what happened breaks my heart,” said Grimes, the former features editor. “We’ve lost so many good journalists, some that I know wouldn’t have left without this happening.”

Adelson runs his business empire from an office at his Venetian resort, reached by a guarded private elevator. It is decorated with magazine covers featuring images of himself. Models of the jets he owns hang from the ceiling over a boardroom table at which he often sits.

Adelson has not set foot in The Review-Journal’s newsroom since the sale, and Moyer said in an interview last month that the owner “doesn’t have anything to do with stories that run in the paper.”

In his responses, Adelson said, “I have never spoken to anybody in the newsroom, nor have we called them to establish newsgathering policies.”

He added: “By the way, newspapers are the first of over 50 companies that I started where my employees tell me how to run my business.”

In some cases, Wright and several others said, the paper’s new leaders may be making decisions pre-emptively that they think will please the casino magnate. But they also say they believe that the handling of articles related to Adelson suggests there is influence from above.

Much of the controversy over editorial interference involves coverage of the Macau-related lawsuit against Sands. Filed in 2010 by a former employee, Steven C. Jacobs, it contains allegations of bribes to officials in Macau. The case, which carries significant ramifications for Sands’ casino operations, is sensitive and acrimonious. Adelson’s legal team has repeatedly tried to have the judge in the case removed (unsuccessfully), claiming she is biased.

Suspicions about interference were heightened shortly after Adelson bought the paper, when The Review-Journal reported that several of its reporters had been asked to monitor three local judges in the weeks before the purchase, including the judge overseeing the suit.

In the ensuing months, Wright and others say, articles about the suit received particularly close scrutiny. In February, Wright said, Cook instructed him to produce an article about a motion filed by lawyers for Sands. Cook mandated that the article include 12 bullet points from the filing that the Adelson side said showed the judge’s bias, without regard for the article’s length.

“We were not allowed to summarize or edit them in any way,” Wright said.

When Jacobs filed a court document, the paper’s management chose not to run an article but instead posted the document online. Cook said the document was so heavily redacted that it was “basically impossible” to write about. For another article about the case, Wright said, Moyer removed or condensed material that outlined Jacobs’ arguments, saying the story was too long.

Staff members also point to coverage of Las Vegas Sands’ attempt to build an NFL-ready stadium using hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding.

The original version of an article that ran in early February, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, quoted an economics professor as saying it was “the height of hypocrisy” that Adelson was “preaching to get government out of people’s lives, and he turns around and says he needs $780 million to build a new stadium.”

Word came down through Cook that Moon thought the article focused too much on criticism of Adelson’s proposal, Wright said. The “hypocrisy” quote, and another saying the plan was “highly risky,” were removed before the article was published.

Wright said the message was sent that “Moon felt that the comments about Sheldon were personally directed and wouldn’t be allowed in the story.”

Cook said the quote was removed because it incorrectly characterized Adelson’s viewpoint.

In response to claims of editorial interference, Cook said: “The notion that editors shouldn’t edit stories is pretty silly. The reality is we’re supposed to be editing stories, we’re supposed to be trying to make them better.”

He said it was “not my motivation” to be kind to the owner.

The constant review, though, has fueled frustration in the newsroom. One day in February, a reporter sent an email to editors just after 4 a.m. (a copy was obtained by The Times). Distressed and unable to sleep, the reporter complained that details were inserted into his story that made it inaccurate. If this continued, the reporter wrote, “the newspaper is nothing more than the PR extension of Las Vegas Sands through the Adelson publisher.”

“I can’t live with that,” the reporter wrote. “And I hope you can’t either.”

In his written responses, Adelson said he and his family would “continue to invest in the paper and its people.” He laid out a vision that included creating an investigative team, adding health and political sections and forming a fact-checking department.

Wright said he thought there was a “silver lining” to having a billionaire as an owner. “I think he legitimately is interested in having a quality publication, and he doesn’t have to worry about the bottom line.”

“But it’s like a lot of things in life,” Wright added. “Eventually you have to pay the bill. In this case, the bill is you sacrifice some editorial independence to the interests of the owner.”

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