This story has been updated with a response from the Las Vegas Review-Journal
Things are always going to be strange when Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson is in the mix. He bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal a while back, but tried to keep it a secret. Not so much luck with that.
Then came reports the politically active Adelson had begun prohibiting stories investigating the costs of a publicly financed stadium in the area designed to lure the Raiders from Oakland. Those reports were denied.
Adelson is the single largest investor in advancing the stadium project. Well, make that second-largest. It turns out local taxpayers will be on the hook for putting forth $750 million if the $1.9 billion deal as currently structured gets done according to Jon Ralston, a Nevada print and KNTV journalist. It would be an American record for public funding of a sports stadium.
Ralston has just printed an internal Review-Journal memo two weeks ago from instructing reporters to question all candidates about whether or not they’d support the use of public money in the form of room taxes to build the stadium. The memo said the question would not be published for the paper’s online election package.
Ralston suggest that’s weird. Or, as he puts it, “Why ask a question of candidates that will not be used in the paper? Are they getting a head count for Adelson? Reminding candidates that the newspaper could be used as a bludgeon?”
Surveys suggest a majority of Las Vegas residents are against spending $1.9 billion for the stadium. Could it be that Adelson is trying to find a way to work around that by just having local politicians sign off on the deal?
Response to the article from Review-Journal managing editor Glenn Cook.
Your
post of Aug. 26 (“Sheldon Adelson trying to take short cut with Raiders in Las Vegas?”) cannot even loosely be described as journalism. You presented the wild speculation and opinion of a single biased blogger as fact. You made no attempt to corroborate the opinion of that blogger. And you made no attempt to contact Las Vegas Review-Journal management to get an explanation and context of what was written in a leaked email message before publishing content that smears an entire news organization.
Moreover, your post appears to lifted from a Deadspin post without attribution . . .
The conclusions in Jon Ralston’s blog post from August 26, 2016 (“RJ editor to reporters: Ask candidates about public stadium funding but not for the newspaper”), presented as fact, have no basis in reality. Ralston, the author of the blog post upon which your content was based, deliberately ignored language in the email to support a conspiracy theory that, like your own post, had no corroboration.
It goes without saying: We completely deny any allegation that our reporters are collecting information for our owner and not for readers. We completely deny any allegation that we will not publish what our reporters learn about the positions of legislative and County Commission candidates on public funding for a domed football stadium. Your allegations are not only completely false and completely unfounded, but completely stupid. In fact, we already have talked to lawmakers about the prospect of a stadium special session and reported the position of at least one lawmaker who opposes the use of tax dollars for a stadium:
For reference, here’s Don Ham’s Aug. 11 email, which formed the basis of Ralston’s rant:
“All of you who are handling state Senate, state Assembly and Clark County Commission races for the tab should make sure to ask this very timely question of the candidates.
This question is NOT going to be added to the question asked of candidates for the online election package, though.
Should public money, in the form of room taxes, be used to build a proposed stadium in Las Vegas. Why or why not?
Any questions, see me.
Thanks.”
Ham’s reference in the first paragraph to “the tab” is to our print tabloid general election voter guide, which will be included in our Sunday, Oct. 23 edition and posted online. For these voter guides, which we have produced for every statewide primary and general election going back decades, reporters interview candidates for a specific office (for example, Assembly District 13) about campaign issues and their backgrounds. The purpose of the section is to provide voters with information that helps them make decisions about whom to support.
The fact that Ham brought up “the tab” indicates to reporters that the question he wants asked is for publication. Nowhere in this email does it say we won’t publish what they report, or that we will keep secret what they report, or that reporters are to provide their findings directly to editors but not include the information in the stories they file.
When Ham wrote “This question is NOT going to be added to the question asked of candidates for the online election package, though.” he was referring to our online Voter Guide, which is a completely separate product from “the tab.” The “online election package” Ham was referring to can be found through our home page navigation bar at reviewjournal.com by hovering over the “Election 2016” bar and clicking on “Voter Guide.” The direct URL is: http://www.reviewjournal.com/voter-guide-2016
The content under this section is completely different from “the tab” because it is provided by the candidates themselves, not produced by our reporters. For an example, scroll down to Assembly District 13 and click on the link for Paul Anderson. You’ll see a 60-second video that we allowed each candidate to film, some personal and professional information, a description of the elected office they’re running for, a map of their district, key endorsements, and their responses to three policy/issue questions selected by editors in early spring. In legislative races, we decided to ask candidates about the recreational marijuana initiative, the background check initiative, and about K-12 education. In County Commission races, the questions are “What is the biggest challenge facing Clark County?”; “If elected, what would you do to address that challenge?”; and “The 2017 Legislature is expected to consider one or more proposals to allow municipalities, including counties, to increase property taxes to bring them closer to levels they were at before the Great Recession. Is this a good idea? Why or why not?”
When Ham wrote “This question is NOT going to be added to the question asked of candidates for the online election package, though” he was referring to these three questions in our finished online Voter Guide. A lot of work went into creating and coding these pages, then getting digital questionnaires to candidates, then uploading all their responses to these pages. It involved newsroom assistants, web developers, reporters and our data editor. We consider these pages a finished product. These candidate pages have been on our site, unchanged, since well before the June primary election. We decided against adding the stadium question to the pot, background check and K-12 questions asked of legislative candidates, as well as the questions asked of commission candidates, because we will report candidate answers on the stadium issue in our print voter guide, which also will appear online. Aka “the tab.”
