The piece, which was published concurrently in the Bristol Press, was a garbled mess, veering incomprehensibly from the need for court reform to condemnation of Gonzalez’s record. Under the byline Edward Clarkin, the article mentioned Gonzalez in connection with a “judging the judges” survey that the Review-Journal does every other year. This one was from a tiny Connecticut paper called the New Britain Herald. Shortly afterward, he received a clip from the corporate counsel, who routinely forwarded stories that might be of interest to the editors. “I told them ‘Here it is, do with it what you will,’ expecting them to forward it on.” After his reporters spent two weeks engaged in apparently pointless judge-watching, Wright turned their notes over to the paper’s publisher and corporate counsel. “There was never an expectation that anything from that would result in a story,” Wright said of the request to monitor the judges. (The Nevada Supreme Court ultimately rejected this request.) She later put the billionaire in his place while he was in the witness stand, with the words, “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me.” In March, Gonzalez had fined Sands China two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for withholding documents in April, Sands China attempted to have her removed from the case altogether.
Sands, a contentious wrongful-termination suit filed against Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands Corporation. In November, with negotiations for the paper’s sale presumably in progress, Wright had been told by the publisher that GateHouse executives wanted reporters to monitor the performance of three Clark County judges, including Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, who is presiding over Jacobs v. Wright, a soft-spoken, genial man with a mildly sardonic air, recounted for me how his team, flabbergasted at the news of an anonymous buyer, had defied (or, possibly, obeyed) the advice of their new owners to “just focus on doing their jobs,” regardless of who those owners might be.
Last week, I met the Review-Journal’s deputy editor, James Wright, in a quiet conference room at the paper’s offices, a bit north of downtown. But the response from inside the paper demonstrated that, even for a determined billionaire and his family, it may not be so easy to gain control of a newspaper. To many observers, Adelson’s background, combined with the initial attempt to keep his family’s ownership interest in the Review-Journal secret, does not augur well for the future editorial independence of the paper, which was founded in 1909 and has a circulation of about a hundred and sixty-five thousand, the largest in Nevada. He also owns an Israeli tabloid, Israel Hayom ( Israel Today), which is brazen in its support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line positions on Palestinian rights and other issues. political process and a mega-donor to Republican candidates, having spent, at minimum, ninety-eight million dollars in political contributions in the 2012 cycle, not counting dark-money contributions. He said that he wasn’t directly involved with the purchase, and wasn’t interested in owning a newspaper.Īdelson is a keen participant in the U.S. “My money that the children have with which to buy the newspaper is their inheritance,” Adelson told the Macau Daily Times. Six days after the sale was announced, on December 16th, Review-Journal reporters revealed that the acquiring company, News + Media Capital Group, which had been represented in the sale by an executive named Michael Schroeder, was in fact controlled by members of Sheldon Adelson’s family-and that, as many had suspected, the money had originated with the casino magnate himself. The paper had changed hands in early December for the wildly inflated price of a hundred and forty million dollars New Media Investment Group (formerly GateHouse Media), which had purchased the paper only months earlier, reported flipping it for an estimated sixty-nine-per-cent profit. Last month, reporters at the Las Vegas Review-Journal undertook a remarkable investigation into the secret identity of the buyer of their own newspaper. Photograph by Ronda Churchill / The New York Times / Redux When Sheldon Adelson’s family secretly bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the newspaper’s reporters began digging.
0 kommentar(er)
