The statement was printed in Thursday’s edition of the Review-Journal, alongside a thoroughly reported story that used anonymous sources to identify Adelson’s son-in-law Patrick Dumont as the broker of the deal.
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“This week, with each of the Republican candidates for president and the national media descending on Las Vegas for the year’s final debate, we did not want an announcement to distract from the important role Nevada continues to play in the 2016 presidential election”.
The bad news-and, alas, it does look like mostly bad news, potentially anyway, to the 110 editors and reporters who work for the hard-charging Review-Journal-is that the mystery buyer is Sheldon Adelson, the controversial, libel suit-prone global gambling billionaire and sugar daddy to Republican presidential candidates.
Today, the Review-Journal published its own front-page article highlighting the outrage in journalism circles over the mysterious sale-there are no other newspapers of any significance in the United States whose owners are not known-as well as clues that Schroeder has links to Adelson.
He repeatedly said “no”, saying at one point, “I have no personal interest”, which made me wonder if he was leaving some wiggle room in his answer. The paper, derisively nicknamed “bibiton”, a portmanteau of a nickname of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hebrew word for newspaper, has been criticized by some as a mouthpiece for the premier, who counts the casino owner as one of his largest political donors.
The newspaper’s staff, media observers around the country and even politicians had demanded to know the name of the new boss. Chief Executive Sheldon Adelson addresses the media during the grand opening ceremony of the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. He says Adelson, a major Republican donor, had been pursuing the publication and then ended up paying three times the paper’s worth just months after New Media Investment Group bought it in February.
Adelson’s name came up as a possible buyer, especially since he already owns a daily newspaper in Israel, which Nevada columnist said the mogul “uses to wield political influence”.
Fortune first reported that Adelson was the newspaper’s primary buyer on Wednesday afternoon, citing “multiple sources familiar with the situation”.
The secretiveness of the deal, in which the newspaper refused to reveal its new owner, got him off to a rocky start with colleagues in his new business venture.
Ron Reese, a spokesman for Las Vegas Sands Corp., said in an email Wednesday that he had no information on the matter and wouldn’t comment on reports of Adelson buying the paper.
It’s hard to ask the public to trust a newspaper that is unwilling to reveal its ownership and their ties to other private interests.
“The Society’s Code of Ethics stresses that those engaged in journalism need to be accountable and transparent”, SPJ Ethics Committee Chairman Andrew Seaman said in a statement.
He said he doesn’t expect them to be involved in news or editorial decisions because Gatehouse Media LLC, a subsidiary of the previous owner, will keep running the publication with a Sunday circulation of 184,000.
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Greenspun says the papers will have some political differences, “but that just makes for good reading”.
