Las Vegas Paper Had Reporters Track Judge Overseeing Adelson Case
Image by getty images
The company that owned the Las Vegas Review Journal asked the newspaper to monitor three judges, including one overseeing a lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson, prior to selling the newspaper to the casino magnate.
Clark County, Nevada District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez has had contentious exchanges with Adelson and his lawyers during the wrongful termination lawsuit brought against Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., by a former employee.
GateHouse Media asked the Review Journal to track three judges a month before it sold the newspaper on December 10 to Adelson’s family for $140 million, considered a steep price in the present climate when many media are struggling to turn a profit.
Non-editorial staff at the Review Journal told editorial staff to include Gonzalez, the newspaper reported on December 19. Reporters were to “observe how engaged the judge is in the case, whether they’re prepared or not, if they favor one lawyer over another, whether they’re over- or under-worked — even whether they show up for work on time, or not,” according to an internal memo. There was no expectation the tracking would appear in a story.
The Review Journal has vowed to aggressively report on Adelson’s purchase of the newspaper. Adelson had at first attempted to conceal his purchase of the newspaper.
News editors considered the assignment tracking the judges a waste of time, but were told that GateHouse mandated the monitoring.
“The reason for the assignment and its unprecedented nature was never explained,” according to the Review Journal news story.
Adelson has said, since being revealed as the buyer, that he would not interfere with the newspaper’s editorial decisions.
An Israeli newspaper owned by Adelson, Israel Hayom, is known to reflect his political preferences in Israel, which lean toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and in the United States, where he is a major donor to Republicans.
GateHouse had previously asked another paper it owns, the Sarasota, Florida, Herald-Tribune, to do the work, but staffers there balked, saying that Las Vegas was too removed from their beat.
On November 30, another GateHouse-owned newspaper, the New Britain Herald, a small paper in Connecticut, published a story critical of courts handling business cases. A substantial portion f the article singled out Gonzalez, saying her rulings were unfair.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
