All the Hard Ways: A Native Son of Vegas, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal

The earliest memory I’ve got of anybody ever being proud of me has to do, directly, with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It’s a weekday morning, 1988, or 1989, in what was then the far suburban reaches of Las Vegas (and what’s now where those suburbs begin). I’m four years-old, sitting at our kitchen table, housing some cereal. Dad, in his suit and tie, was drinking coffee, reading the Review-Journal. Same as always. He’d go through the paper, section by section, every morning before taking us to school. All I can specifically remember aside from the cereal (sugary), the coffee (black), and the weekday warrior suit (also black, with a red tie) was that, this particular morning, my Dad was already done with the front page, and was onto either the Nevada or the Business section. And I picked up the front page to imitate him—the way kids love to imitate the most adult things adults do—and just started reading the front page headlines out loud.

At first, Dad thought I was just jabbering, typical four year-old nonsense. Then he started to hear the way this sounded not just familiar, but recognizable in the sense that the wordage was patently adult. He pulled at the giant broadsheet hiding my grinning four year-old face, folded it over, pointed to a headline, and without further instruction, again, I read the headline out loud.

“Holy shit, Bonnie, come here, did you know Foster can—”

“Don’t curse.”

“Mom Dad said holy shi—”

“Don’t you dare say it.”

“Bonnie, look.”

And he pointed to a headline, and again, I read the A1 headlines of the Review Journal to both of my parents. My Dad knew I could read. I guess, suddenly, I did, too.

I couldn’t have been the only one.

If you were raised in Las Vegas, and you’re of a certain age, you can remember a time when the town was so much smaller, figuratively and literally—in 1990, around the first time I read the RJ (how locals refer to it), its population was a little less than a third of what it is now, if that. And everyone, it seemed, had a subscription to the RJ, and the same morning routine as my Dad. Or something like it.

Because back then, Vegas was a town with a robust, growing middle class. The local press and its contents deeply mattered, to everyone, in the same way the old western boomtown presses once did. In fact, when Vegas was literally an old western boomtown, the RJ was there: The paper has been published, in one form or another, since 1909.

As it quickly became the fastest growing city in America, its presses increased in importance. For a time, it was a decently competitive media market, too—the Las Vegas Sun presented an alternative to the RJ, owned and operated by its founding publisher-editor, local character Hank Greenspun, until he died in 1989. That’s when the Sun entered into a 50-year joint operating agreement with the RJ as an afternoon paper, ensuring its legacy wouldn’t be completely screwed, with totally independent staffs. But what was its legacy?

The Sun was basically a propaganda arm of Greenspun, a local real-estate-developer-turned-media-magnate with ties to Republican and Zionist politics. (Sound familiar?) This is a guy who was pardoned by JFK after being convicted for supplying guns to the earliest iterations of the IDF (thus violating the Neutrality Acts). He was even netted up in some weird Watergate stuff. He wasn’t all bad, though—he once went toe-to-to with Joseph McCarthy (and ran a story essentially implying, with a comic absence of evidence, that McCarthy was a self-loathing closeted gay man). And like everyone in Vegas of a certain age, Greenspun had ties to the mob (in his early years, he was a flack for Bugsy as the mobster opened the Flamingo, thus kickstarting the Las Vegas Strip).

All of which is to say that Greenspun was, if nothing, one in a long lost cast of true Vegas characters who took pride and ownership of the city’s fortunes and failures—he even regularly published a front-page column in the Sun called “Where I Stand,” an endearingly batty read until Greenspun died. Either way, the paper was, if nothing, utterly transparent.

So it came as a surprise but not a shock when, in 2010, the Sun was awarded its first and only Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reporting, on a series of construction deaths in Las Vegas. It also came as a surprise but not a shock when, immediately after, the journalist who wrote the series, Alexandra Berzon, left for greener pastures. She likely knew what has been in the cards for Vegas journalists: While a fertile ground for stories, the media market there hasn’t exactly been a fertile place for journalists in recent years.

Mismanagement and economic hardship had forced the fairly disconnected, now stumbling modern media market of Vegas to trim everything and anything. Four alt-weeklies were whittled down to one. The Sun stopped independent distribution and had become a supplement inside the RJ. And after a certain point—starting around early 2009—when the fastest growing city in America crashed hard, and became the most unemployed, the most foreclosed-upon, and the most bankrupt city in America, nobody needed to get the paper, because they already knew what was inside of it. That middle class Vegas grew up with basically evaporated overnight, and for the first time in Vegas’ history, for most people, reading the RJ wasn’t even a matter of wanting to so much as being able to afford the ability to do so, let alone the time.

That isn’t to say that—despite moments like the dumb, blogger-suing, comic mole-hunt boondoggle RJ parent company Stephens Media once precipitated—the RJ and the Sun have only suffered, or that they haven’t been complicit in their own suffering. Both papers have broken great stories, hilarious stories, important stories. The RJ’s told the story of Las Vegas through its proud Las Vegans, whether its the paper’s own shoe-leather columnist John L. Smith, the Vegas analog to Tom Robbins or Wayne Barrett, a guy who has been seemingly sued and possibly bankrupted by every casino magnate in town for his reporting. Or the comedy that is local gossip-cum-pirate Norm Clarke (truly a human who could only exist in the Vegas media).

The Sun has told the stories of those construction deaths, of the city’s economic depression and slow-burning recovery, of the unemployment, of our insane and unhinged local politicos (like the time former mob lawyer-turned-mayor Oscar Goodman told a classroom of fourth-graders that, if marooned on a desert island, he’d take with him a showgirl and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin). And both papers have slipped, whether its been famously softpaw reporting of stories like the racist campaign of U.S. Senate would-be Sharron Angle (whose xenophobic views, no doubt, many Las Vegans shared), or the RJ’s comically bad attempts at clickbait over the last few years. They’re too embarrassing to link to.

But the bigger picture, the one that the media seems to be regularly missing when covering the recent scandalousness of the Review-Journal, is not that an unapologetic, egregiously wealthy Republican Zionist owns the media game in town right now, and that he has designs on influencing elections—that, Vegas has had before. And we survived. It’s not even the new twist, which is that—unlike Greenspun—this new owner seems to have designs on shadowy ownership and duplicitous intent, though they are covering that story well (as are the journalists at the paper itself).

It’s that Las Vegas is now a town forever in recovery—an addict of a municipality, ever embattled, never quite clean—and because of that, a media outlet owned by not a Republican, and not a Zionist, but a casino magnate is nothing but bad news.

The 2008 crash hit Vegas harder than anyone in America, because the city’s boosters of growth promised more jobs, more money, more potential for the American Dream than ever before, when it already was that fast-growing boomtown. Money and people poured in. Home loans were distributed en masse. Remember? This was only seven years ago.

The euphoria was delusional, and then, it became an anvil of reality, crashing down, hard, into Earth, smashing people’s lives and a city into pieces. As it turned out, the jobs were fake. So was the money for the homes. So were the homes. Enter joblessness, homelessness, a city hit by a figurative bomb that now looks, in places, as though it’s still rebuilding from the detonation of a literal one.

The prospect of boosterism is scary—or it should be—for the majority of Las Vegans. And Sheldon Adelson stands to benefit enormously from a paper that can whitewash whatever news could forestall the growth municipal and industry boosterism seeks to inflate long after the 2016 election is through. Sheldon Adelson stands to benefit from a paper that can whitewash the relationships between employers and employees, the company of our Company Town and its many workers (and make no mistake, everyone in Vegas, in some way or another, works for The Company). Sheldon Adelson stands to benefit from ignoring or coloring unfair and/or unsafe labor practices, economic conditions, local politicians and law enforcement — all the basic realities of Las Vegas, knowledge of which is at least helpful, on some level, to give the people of Las Vegas a sense of choice.

And not just choice, but of awareness of choice — a reason to be mad and wary and skeptical before those great, unseen powers behind those reasons have inflicted significant damage upon them. And Adelson is someone who stands to benefit from an ignorance of choice, in so, so, so many ways. Let’s be perfectly clear: Sheldon Adelson is amassing power, and it’s the kind of power the fourth estate exists to scrutinize, and ensure that it doesn’t go unchecked.

The legacy of Adelson owning the RJ is already scary, and it has so much less to do with the upcoming election than any of the horse-race reporters would have you believe. Don’t worry about Sheldon Adelson trying to win the votes of Las Vegans. They’re not all idiots, and they can’t all be swayed to vote a certain way by a paper most of them don’t read, anyway.

If history is any indication, it’s more that which they don’t know, in Las Vegas—and that which the rest of America doesn’t know of Las Vegas—that can, in fact, hurt them. And Adelson has already demonstrated how little he wants Las Vegans to know, beginning with his own involvement with the RJ. Who knows where it goes from here?

I care about the Journal because I care about Las Vegas, and I care about Las Vegas because my family is still there, my friends are still there, and part of me is (and will always be) there. I’ve already daydreamed of waking up one morning to find that an entrepreneur committed to transparency and great reporting has staked out Vegas as a fertile ground for good local journalism, now more than ever, and made it their mission to give Las Vegans a democracy of choice by knowledge and by news (and also, to enjoy the hell out of reporting on Adelson’s newsroom follies). I can tell you more about that dream, for so many more words, but I’d rather give the last one here to storied Vegas newsman John L. Smith, who deserves a better owner — let alone one who hasn’t tried to litigate him out of the business, such as Adelson has — yet remains committed to decent journalism no less:

Where’s the firewall between ownership and the newsroom? Given Adelson’s reputation as a micromanager, it had better be made of asbestos. The purchase of the Review-Journal signals a tectonic shift in the political landscape of Las Vegas and Nevada and has the potential to reverberate all the way to the White House. Sheldon Adelson can buy the newspaper. It’s his right. For a man of his means, that’s the easy part. And the family deserves the chance to make good on its stated intentions. But Adelson can’t purchase the credibility of an independent press. That has to be earned every day on the street by reporters, columnists and editors who must be able to throw elbows without fear or favor — even at the new boss.