The ownership mystery surrounding the latest sale of the Las Vegas Review-Journal is capturing the attention of the media industry as the newspaper’s staff and some politicians are demanding to know who the new boss is.
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Well, sort of. He has yet to officially confirm it.
REUTERS/Tyrone SiuGambling giant Las Vegas Sands Corp’s Chief Executive Sheldon Adelson speaks during an inteview with Reuters in Macau, China, December 18, 2015.Macau (Reuters) – U.S. billionaire and major Republican Party donor Sheldon Adelson said on Friday he met Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump earlier this week, describing his fellow business tycoon as “very charming”.
“Any one of the 14 candidates is better than what we have today, better than what the opposition has by far”, said Adelson, who ranks 32nd on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a fortune estimated at $22 billion, in an interview.
Adelson, known as a heavy donor to the Republican Party, must have really wanted to get his hands on the paper-the $140 million his new company paid was about $38 million more than the group of newspapers was sold for earlier this year.
“This is becoming a Monopoly game”.
The owners had remained a mystery until now, with the newspaper’s staff and politicians having demanded to know the identity of the new boss.
Described by Forbes magazine as the 15th richest man in the United States, Adelson said his family had bought the paper as a financial investment, dismissing speculation the deal was aimed at controlling media in the United States.
“It undermines the basically credibility and trustworthiness that is part and parcel for the American daily press”, he said.
They said they held back because they didn’t want an announcement to distract from Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate held at the Venetian casino-hotel.
He said the public company had no intention to resell the paper but did so out of fiduciary duty in the interest of its shareholders. A confidentiality agreement didn’t allow them to disclose who it was doing business with.
Reed said reporters everywhere had spent too much time on the story with the intention of generating controversy and claimed that readers didn’t care, despite the hundreds of comments attached to the Review-Journal’s latest story online.
“Not one consumer, subscriber has called to complain”, Reed said.
“The family wants a journalism product that is second-to-none and will continue to invest in the paper to achieve this goal”. He was classmates at Georgetown University with former President Bill Clinton and has supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. The Sun is distributed alongside the Review-Journal as the result of a joint-operating agreement. But the idea of a wealthy owner with strong political interests isn’t new, and certainly not in Las Vegas.
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This entry has been corrected to reflect that Las Vegas Sun CEO and publisher Brian Greenspun was once classmates with Bill Clinton but not roommates.
