I could not believe that a daily newspaper in a city the size of Las Vegas (3 million) would endorse Donald Trump for president. But the Las Vegas Review-Journal did today, Oct. 16, 2024. As a result, I'm cancelling my subscription.
We moved to Vegas about a year ago. As a former journalism student in high school and an English/journalism major in college, I've always supported my "morning newspaper." To me, reading the daily is the essential way to learn about the city and state you live in.
I am not a screaming liberal. In fact, I'm a middle-road voter. But the right-wing bent to the Review-Journal's reporting made me curious. I'd always thought Las Vegas was a "purple" town, so I looked up the newspaper's history. Turns out, I'd subscribed to a rather dishonest rag.
According to Wikipedia:
Sheldon Adelson estate ownership
When the paper was sold in 2015, it was initially unclear who the buyer was. The purchaser was a limited liability company, News + Media Capital Group LLC, and the only name listed on the documents was Michael Schroeder, a publisher of four small regional newspapers in Connecticut.[17] At a December 10 staff meeting informing the Review-Journal staff that the paper had been sold, Schroeder was introduced as the manager. He refused to say who the owners of News + Media were, saying that employees should "focus on [their] jobs...and don't worry about who [the owners] are."[18] Jason Taylor, the Review-Journal's publisher, said only that the ownership included "multiple owner/investors, that some are from Las Vegas, and that in face-to-face meetings he has been assured that the group will not meddle in the newspaper’s editorial content.”[17] There were widespread rumors that the primary buyer was Sheldon Adelson, and a week later three Review-Journal reporters confirmed that the purchase had been orchestrated by Adelson's son-in-law Patrick Dumont on Adelson's behalf.[19] A month before the new owner was revealed, three reporters at the newspaper received an assignment from corporate management: Spend two weeks monitoring the activity of three Clark County judges. One of the judges was District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, who was hearing a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit filed against Adelson and his company,[20] a lawsuit alleging that Adelson's Macao casino, Sands Macao, was connected to the Chinese Triads.[21]
In January a set of editorial principles were drawn up and publicized to ensure the newspaper's independence and to deal with possible conflicts of interest involving Adelson's ownership. In February Craig Moon, a veteran of the Gannett organization, was announced as the new publisher and promptly withdrew those principles from publication. He also began to personally review, edit, and sometimes kill stories about an Adelson-promoted proposal for the future Las Vegas Raiders football stadium.[22] In the months since, reporters say that stories about Adelson, and particularly about an ongoing lawsuit involving his business dealings in Macau, have been heavily edited by top management.[23]
The new ownership triggered numerous departures. On December 23 the paper's editor Mike Hengel stepped down in a "voluntary buyout".[24] Many reporters and editors left the newspaper citing "curtailed editorial freedom, murky business dealings and unethical managers."[25] Longtime columnist John L. Smith resigned after he was told he could no longer write anything about Adelson, a frequent focus of his reporting up until then.[25] Within six months, all three of the reporters who broke the story of Adelson's ownership had left the paper.[25]
Source: Wikipedia. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Review-Journal to find out more.
My Letter to the Editor
As a result of the Review-Journal's endorsement of Trump and other right-wing zealots, I wrote the following letter to the editor:
Shame on the Las Vegas Review-Journal for cow-towing to your owners' and publishers’ right-wing views by endorsing Donald Trump for president. A daily newspaper in a city of this size should provide fact-based and responsible journalism, not propaganda. Deborah Saunders's "commentary" in your Oct. 16 edition basically says that Trump’s morals and behaviors don’t matter. To her, “it’s about his policies.” Sadly, this has become fascist-speak for retaining power at all costs. To your publishers, it doesn't matter that Trump is a perpetual liar, sexual predator, racist, misogynist, insurrectionist, convicted felon, and a wanna-be dictator. Nor does it matter that he threatens to use military power against anyone who disagrees with him and gladly sidles up to the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Nope: your newspaper endorsed Trump, even when Republicans by the droves have ardently spoken out against his re-election. Evidently, after casino-magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the Review-Journal in 2015, it devolved into a propaganda machine similar to Rupert Murdoch's FOX News. Although Adelson is long-gone, the Review-Journal's journalistic ethics remain long-gone. And I as a reader will be long-gone as soon as I can figure out how to cancel my subscription.
So Now, Where Can I Get my City and State News?
I really hated to give up my "morning paper," but I'm not going to support any daily that skews or omits the news to its political bent or owners' business goals. Any daily newspaper that would do that or endorse Donald Trump is simply a propaganda rag. And the Las Vegas Review-Journal appears to be just that.
Comentarios