Las Vegas Review-Journal Staff Balks At Limits On Covering New Owner

You misunderstand. The fact that management is balking at such a low-key step is what has me gobsmacked.

 

Ah, gotcha. You'd think it would have been a pretty simple transition. Yeah, there'd be some consternation about Adelson and his political beliefs, but that wouldn't have been enough to make the transition as messy as it became.

 

Le bump ...
Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist resigns

 

Seems to me the folks who are upset about the publisher need to quit ASAP. I understand the angst, but let's say you buy a newspaper and you tell the editor, managing editor, paginators, desk people, "I don't want to see anything about me or my family in the paper. I want to be informed about any article about me on the wire or our columnists and I must approve it, but I'm telling you now I will most assuredly kill it. I want nothing written about myself or my my family!" This is against journalism ethics but the staff members have little choice if they want to keep their jobs. Right? There's no other recourse. If I own the publication I have the 'right' to dictate what's in it.

 

Why haven't you quit?

 

Good question. But don't you agree in the case of the Las Vegas newspaper the publisher has the "right" to dictate what is in the paper since he owns it? Throw journalism ethics out of the equation for a moment. The new owner isn't bound by those. He owns the shop; he doesn't want his name ever mentioned. That's his right, so if you work there and feel that's wrong, you have to quit, right? If you don't quit, you have to accept it.

 

Good Christ. So, you're the arbiter of what the industry should have done 10 years ago to stem the failure of the business, but this is A-OK? Fucking brilliant. Yes, he can do what he wants. Doesn't make it ethical.

 

What BDC99 Said.

But the poster lost me when he said forget ethics anyway. Give an inch here, and next week management asks if something can be slanted another way (perhaps to help a friend or big advertisee?) And before you know it, gamers have headlines like "Local team loses, but tries really really hard."

 

Ethics in journalism is a quaint notion the looks good carved on a plaque hung at a J-school entrance...but it simply doesn't exist in modern industry, having been replaced by an all-encompassing focus on profits.

 

The readers have a say in what constitutes ethical behavior. If they decide the paper is an unreliable source of information, they'll stop reading it. That's bad for profits, if such exist.

 

Do we have some good examples of newspapers who have done a good job covering their owners?

 

Of note, the columnist reluctantly toed the line when it came to Adelson. But just recently, they also told him he was banned from writing about Steve Wynn, and that proved to be the last straw. If you can't write about the top casino bosses in Vegas, there's not much left to cover.