Schoenmann: No comment.

I'd just had pretty awful dental work this afternoon when Sun city hall scribe Joe Schoenmann came into the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf by UNLV where I was reading the paper before a pre-Switzerland last-minute errand spree. He didn't notice me four-days unshaven in my baseball cap barely hiding unkempt nest of hair, but suddenly I felt incredible nervous.

A journalist friend, via text message, informed me that I was obligated to approach Joe. Here I'd been writing about something incredibly personal, his work and career and the 535-word correction he spawned, for more than a week. I had reached out to him and his editor for comment and received no response whatsoever, a stunning lack of professional courtesy that the Sun itself would never accept from the subject of any of its inquiries. They would, as they should, at very least expect a respectful "no comment." But evidently, the newspaper chose to operate in a stonewalling position that it does not abide in its own sources. I hope its sources take note of that next time they're being chased by someone from the Sun.

Anyhow, I was nervous and I really didn't think I owed anybody anything, but I sucked it up and approached him. I said hello and I must have looked pretty awful because it took him a moment to realize who I was. And I think when he did, his first reaction was to smile before he remembered that I've been blogging about him for a week or so.

I asked why he hadn't responded to my questions. In the nicest possible way, he told me I needed to speak to his editors. I asked him how he was. He looked like he might be willing to answer and then said he didn't want to speak. And that was that.

I've been thinking about this non-exchange all afternoon. I can't say Joe was ever a friend, but I've always found him to be friendly and pleasant, and he was so today even under the circumstances. He did what he should have done if he did not want to give his side, although it is his name that is now forever tied on the Internet to these posts and not that of the people he works for.

Mostly, though, I've been pondering my own role in this. Many colleagues and readers have complimented and supported this coverage and fed me (mostly unsupportable) leads, but many have also wondered where I get off breaking some equivalent of the blue wall of silence and digging in on another journalist.

But here's the problem: There is absolutely nobody else in Las Vegas with the journalistic credibility and the genuine independence to do it. It is one of the saddest facts of this large city that still acts like a hick town, that even the alternative print media (CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly) are owned by the two competing media conglomerates (Stephens and Greenspun respectively, owners of the R-J and Sun respectively.) The alt-press does occasionally do its job with an item here or there, but it's telling that Matt O'Brien's Media Watch column disappeared in CityLife after it ceased to be owned independently. That may have been a function of Matt's own time constraints as he wrote his book on life in the Vegas storm drains, but if the editors thought it was important, somebody else would have kept it. Instead, the most recent CityLife Media Issue contained not a single bit of media criticism that I can recall.

In fact, if the Schoenmann-Summerlin mess had happened at the R-J, I'd probably worry about my own perceived conflicts because I write for two Greenspun magazines. That's how incestuous this media town is. That said, I have many times in this blog and in private e-mails to editors and reporters, raised coverage concerns (mainly on GLBT issues as a longtime NLGJA leader) and to praise excellent work at both newspapers.

I believe media criticism is an extremely important part of the functioning of the press, especially when the media companies have so many business ties to so many important industries in our community. The newspapers in the major cities are better because they are being watched as carefully as they watch the institutions they cover. The media have far too much power for nobody to be keeping an eye on them.

What should alarm the Las Vegas Sun more than anything is that so many people are looking at this situation and saying, "Eh, what do you expect? It's the Sun." Read the comments on this blog and on Fark.Com and elsewhere where this story has traveled since I started commenting on it. And if you could see my e-mail!

But I see that as a sad, mammoth insult to the journalists over there who do outstanding, award-winning work and the editors who have taken a unique circumstance -- being folded into a full-service daily with no advertising to worry about and no obligation to cover the daily minutiae -- and have used it to do some terrific enterprise reporting. Just this past weekend, for instance, the Jeff German piece about the couple who got screwed by the LAX Nightclub was a piece that needed to be done, could have been cheesy but in fact rang true and advanced the IRS-nightclub saga by showing how it affects real people. (That piece, incidentally, is the sort of thing the alternative press would've done in any other city, but here the nightclub ads are their lifeblood, so...)

Those within the Sun who think that I'm being petty and personal about Schoenmann miss the point entirely: I'm treating you like a real newspaper. This community deserves every bit of accuracy and shoe leather they would get from one. Go ahead and hold yourselves to a lower standard, but don't be surprised when the rest of the community does as well.

It is absolutely not personal. It was good that I dropped in on Joe today because it reminded me that this is more real to him than it is for me, as is the case for most every story we cover. But there's also a reason why we put our bylines on stories, and one is so people can hold someone accountable when things go horribly wrong. I've been on the wrong side of media controversy before and I know how it feels, but I also knew that I deserved my licking and moved on. (See final item here for my worst media hour. Actually, I didn't just accept it. I wrote an apology to my former colleagues for the boneheaded E&P piece I wrote that caused the ruckus.)

Things went horribly wrong at the Sun and, so I've discovered, in other parts of Schoenmann's work. And something ought to be done to show the reading public that the editors of this newspaper know that. A nine-paragraph correction is a start, but it raised as many questions as it answered.

That said, I'm outta here! We're off to Europe! There's email there, too, I hear, but I suspect that, in the great tradition of Vegas scandals, this one, too, will be swept under the rug and forgotten. Oh well.