Further Tales of The Las Vegas Sun Disaster

(UPDATE: THE 12TH ENTRY IN THE COMMENTS SECTION APPEARS TO BE FROM THE WOMAN REFERENCED BELOW WHO WROTE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR. IT IS TELLING THAT SHE OFFERED HER VIEWPOINT BUT NEITHER SUN M.E. MIKE KELLEY NOR JOE SCHOENMANN HAVE RESPONDED TO REQUESTS FOR COMMENT. THIS FROM A NEWSPAPER THAT RAN A PETTY FRONT-PAGE PIECE IN SEPTEMBER ABOUT HOW GOV. BILL RICHARDSON WAS DUCKING INTERVIEWS WITH THEM. HMM.)

Like many of you, I've wanted to know more about what happened to create the disastrous story by Las Vegas Sun reporter Joe Schoenmann that led to a 535-word correction in Tuesday's newspaper. Since I blogged about it the other day, the correction has risen to No. 9 on the most-read list on the Sun's website and has garnered the attention of several news outlets including Editor & Publisher, the industry trade, which wrote this.

There's more.

I just got off the line with Tom Warden, the spokesman for Summerlin, who opened up about what happened, how his company reacted and how that shocking correction came to exist.

The original Feb. 26 story depicting Summerlin residents as racists ran in the wake of a shooting that killed a white teenage boy. Warden's first reaction was to call Schoenmann that day to complain about what he saw as factual errors and reporter bias. As the correction notes, Schoenmann had quoted anonymous racist postings from the Review-Journal site by people who claimed to be Summerlin residents, although there's no way of knowing and sources within the Review-Journal have told me that the posters' IP addresses showed that they probably were not. (Also, more than one posting came from the same IP address, I'm told.)

Schoenmann didn't budge about this or any other clear-cut mistake. "He thought it was a good story," Warden said. "I would not call it a productive conversation. I told him there were factual errors in the story. He didn’t think there were."

Oh, but there were. And as Warden prepared to contact Schoenmann's boss, Managing Editor Mike Kelley, he opened the Feb. 27 issue of the newspaper to find a Mike Smith cartoon and a letter to the editor from a Susan M. Gaffney of North Las Vegas that asked Summerlinites: "Do you honestly believe that hte location or size of your home, what you drive, how you look or where your children attend school protects you from reality?"

Here is the cartoon:


Warden said Summerlin folks felt kicked in the gut a second time. He and Summerlin executive Kevin Orrock went to Kelley's office for a half-hour conversation two days later, on Feb. 29. Schoenmann was not present; Warden would not say who, besides he, Kelley and Orrock, was.

Warden stressed repeatedly that the conversation was cordial and Kelley promised to look into the list of complaints he brought. There was no threat of advertising or access withdrawal and Warden said his side stressed from the beginning that they have great respect for the Greenspun family of companies. (That family includes the branch that developed Green Valley, the other major master-planned community in the region.)

Sun sources tell me Kelley himself wrote the March 4 correction. I've reached out to both Schoenmann and Kelley, but I have not heard back. (In fairness, I only reached out to Kelley within the past hour because I wanted to hear from Warden first. I contacted Joe yesterday and received no reply.)

The Summerlin brass are sated. "I had never seen a correction of that length," Warden said. "They took into account every single one of the issues I brought up. We’re gratified that the leadership stepped in and acknowledged the shortcomings."

That said, I have a minor correction to make myself. In my March 1 blog entry, I credited Joe with having quoted a Summerlin executive. Sadly, this, too, is not true. Schoenmann did NOT contact anyone in any official capacity for his piece; the person I thought was a Summerlin executive in a very quick reading was actually a consultant who has not done work for the developer for a while. It is shocking anew that a journalist did not give the developer a chance to respond to such a characterization of their community but then would refuse to even acknowledge shortcomings of the story when called on it.

Warden isn't quite sure how this story happened and said he was not given an explanation by Kelley. His theory: "I would say that there may be a bit of a blind spot out there amongst some of the younger journalists that anonymous blogs are not valid news sources. I was surprised that they would use an anonymous news site as a source for statements unattributed. Blogs can be excellent pubic forums for discussion, but there’s a different standard that you would use for a news piece."

That's charitable, but Schoenmann is in his 30s and has been in this business for more than a decade.

Should Schoenmann face some disciplinary action? "That’s not for us to say," Warden said. "That’s for the Sun’s leadership to determine. I will say we certainly wouldn’t mind if the reporter called to apologize."

Joe?

Joe Schoenmann, Again

It's not surprising, given the enormity of the interest in my posts about the Las Vegas Sun's Joe Schoenmann and his 535-word correction last week that more people would be coming out of the woodwork to observe his work.

I've heard nothing from either Joe or Managing Editor Mike Kelley explaining how that epic correction happened or whether anyone would be disciplined in any way, as most credible newspapers would do in a situation such as this. Evidently, they don't believe that their readers deserve to know what's being done to prevent such a mammoth system failure in the future. I find this funny because this newspaper has shamed a variety of sources with big front-page groans when they don't get responses or access as it wishes. (In addition to the Bill Richardson one last fall that I pointed to in a different post, other readers reminded me they pulled that trick on former Lt. Gov. candidate Barbara Lee Woollen not once but twice in 2006.)

But I did hear from a current Greenspun Media Group journalist (GMG owns the Sun and also owns two publications I write for) who is outraged that nothing has happened to Schoenmann given that "if it were almost anyone else, there would've been some sort of penalty." This employee, to whom I spoke by phone to confirm he/she actually sent this note to me and was who I thought he/she was, made some pretty valid points. Here's a piece of the note:

"To answer your question about whether Joe has been disciplined, I need only to point you to yet another lazy, abysmal front-page piece by him in Saturday's paper. Take a good look at it. You'll notice that it's a love letter to Mayor Goodman, whom Joe routinely sucks up to, in which he seems to claim that because the mayor hired some woman to handle homeless affairs, he's really a good guy on the topic. The only people quoted in the piece are -- you guessed it! -- the mayor and his lackey. Did Joe get off his ass and go interview homeless people or homeless activists? No! That would take some effort."

Yikes. Take a look yourself. It's all true. It's as lazy a piece as the Summerlin one, less the anonymous Web comments to make it journalistic malpractice. This reporter doesn't seem to like to get out and talk to ordinary people much at all, something City Hall scribes really need to be willing to do lest their work end up being sonorous insider pieces about dullsville governmental processes.

Oh, and one more thing noted by this letter-writer: The epic Summerlin correction wasn't the only one Joe was responsible for that week. He also had to correct his Feb. 28 piece on the potential loss of an historic theater in Vegas. If you go to that story, you'll notice that there's a correction quietly appended to the bottom -- so it's easy to miss, unlike sticking it atop the piece where it might be obvious -- that reads: "An error in this story, saying that the Huntridge had a role in several movies, has been removed."

Now how does an error like that happen? And, more interestingly, how does an error like that get corrected? I mean, if the original piece said the place was in the movies, who's going to ring up the paper and say, 'Uh, nut-uh"?

I'd call up and ask, but I suspect I'd get the same stony silence I've gotten so far. They probably think "some blog" isn't worth responding to.

More on the Las Vegas Sun mess

I've reached out to Joe Schoenmann about that epic correction and hope to hear back from him. That said, one of the commenters did raise a point that is extremely disturbing.

Damon Hodge, a writer for the Las Vegas Weekly where I do a column, wrote this short piece in July 2007 about having his confidence betrayed by a friend and fellow journalist. He does not name Schoenmann in it, but he gives loads of detail that lead directly to Joe for anyone who knows him. Not to mention, Hodge states he was directly quoted and named in a piece about messy 2007 NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas after he explicitly said the conversation was off-record.

According to Hodge: "This guy published his friend’s comments along with his friend’s name, leaving his intentions on after-hours’ voicemail: “[blah, blah, blah] cool ... [blah, blah, blah] ... thanks ... [blah, blah, blah] Oh, and I’m going to use your quotes.” Ain’t this a bitch."

I did find the piece he's referring to and, yes, it was Schoenmann who wrote it. You can read it here on this PDF. But you can't read it on the Sun's actual website. For some reason, it's no longer there. See? (UPDATE: A commenter found the correct link on the Sun site. It's here.)

I fear a disturbing pattern is beginning to emerge here. Pulling that sort of switcheroo is a major ethical foul to begin with. Now stir in the calculation that, as a fellow writer at another publication in the same group there wouldn't be much Hodge could do about it. And add the fact that Schoenmann has, once again, opted to reach media insiders -- in addition to Hodge, he also quotes a Kansas City writer -- for comment, which is a pretty easy way to operate. (In the Summerlin piece, Joe quoted the wife of the owner of one of the largest PR firms in Nevada.)

I don't know where this is going. I do know that Joe has been viewed and treated for some time as a golden child at the Sun and that many of his colleagues were aghast when the Summerlin piece ran, as they should have been. It's all very disturbing.

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.

A Correction of Breathtaking Proportions

(UPDATE 9:48 a.m. PT: I've reached out to Joe to get his reaction. Will post it if he is willing and permitted to respond. In the meantime, read a new development here.)
(UPDATE 6:23 pm PT: The correction is now appended to the top of the story on the Web.)

Read this. All of it. Click on it to make it big enough to see. Now. Then we'll talk.

Wow. I had to scan this in because the Las Vegas Sun didn't post it on their pretty new Web site. They also didn't append it to the Web version of the story that spawned it, as is standard for most newspapers. Perhaps that's because had they done so, they would have had to let everyone see just how much of a lie the closing statement is: "All these errors tended to give the story an anti-Summerlin tone, which was not intended... ." That's funny because, from the very first sentences of the piece, it was clear that the entire intention was to snark about the rich, white-bread, partly racist, insulated folks of Summerlin and how fitting it was that a white local high school student would be gunned down to shatter the myth and ignorance of Summerlinsers. And this sentence surely wasn't intended to be fair: "The picture painted by the numbers, then, shows that contrary to the rosy marketing and public relations image, Summerlin is far from immune to the ills found in any major community."

I must say I am clobbered by the shoddiness of the original piece mainly because its author, Joe Schoenmann, is generally a terrific reporter and a wonderful writer. I've known Joe since our days working together in the late 1990s at the Review-Journal, I've referred many editors to him when I either can't or didn't want to do certain freelance assignments and I've often said that I'm lucky he never decided to freelance or I might really have some competition in this town from someone else who, like me, has the versatility to handle just about anything.

But yikes-o-rama on this one. He used comments from anonymous crazies on the R-J Web site to attempt to reflect the views of some proportion of something as mammoth as one of the largest master-planned developments in America, with a 100,000+ population larger than most U.S. cities? He mocks the sales brochure of Summerlin which is, after all, a sales brochure and reads like any you'll ever see anywhere? What does anyone expect it to say, "It's kinda nice living up here, but just in case we give every family a Lo-Jack"?

Most disturbing about this piece is that its thesis was predetermined -- gangbanging invades pristine Summerlin! -- and filled in by some truly lazy reporting that led to some of the serious factual mistakes found in there. It's clear Joe didn't leave his desk for this one, which is OK in some cases; I am, after all, the guy who covered the Monte Carlo fire from New York City, though not because I wanted to. But Joe is writing specifically about a geographic region and the views of its residents and he didn't go to the school grounds or neighborhoods to talk to anyone? The sources quoted in the piece are, in total:

* A school board member
* A Summerlin executive
* Anonymous kooks writing on a Web site
* As a "woman on the street," (journalism parlance for an average person reflective of general sentiment), the wife of one of the most prominent public relations gurus in the state.

This correction also took a full week in coming. And I'd love to know what happened behind the scenes over there. I mean, it is a full-fledged grovel to Summerlin. In fact, some of it is unnecessary self-flagellation pointing up problems in the piece that actually aren't correction-worthy.

It can't be that they were threatened with legal action, as who would the plaintiffs be? Could it be that the Summerlin brass exploded and made a threat to withhold advertising? Cried foul that the Sun, owned by the Greenspun family, is an arch-rival as developers of Green Valley and would never write such a piece about their own territory where, presumably, the brochures also don't advertise the crime rate?

But wait, the Las Vegas Sun doesn't have advertising; it's folded into the R-J, which carries all the advertising water and shares it with them in some insignificant way that can't possibly cover the Sun's operating expenses. Oh, but Greenspun Media Group has lots of other publications (full disclosure: I write for two, Vegas Magazine and Las Vegas Weekly), so maybe that's where the threats came from?

Or, perhaps, the Sun's editors realized that they'd made an honest-to-goodness &%&W#-up and just wanted to come clean for the sake of integrity. If so, bravo. A nine-paragraph correction is above-and-beyond.

Anyway, I'm really disappointed by Joe on this one. Sometimes we get complacent, and I hope he's learned not to do that with this experience. If you want to see just how good he can be, check out this Las Vegas Life piece on brothel fugitive Joe Conforte. Brilliant.

Way to go, Joe S

Twice in recent weeks I've fallen into reading long, really interesting and well-researched pieces in the Las Vegas Sun before pulling back to see the byline. And in both cases, the byline has belonged to none other than Joe Schoenmann, the writer whose work I have pilloried several times over the past year on this blog because of lengthy, shocking and still-unexplained corrections.

Well, it appears the Joe's gotten his mojo back. Both his piece this morning about controversy surrounding the expansion plans of this weird old bar in rural Goodsprings, Nev., and his Jan. 2 look at the fury of pet owners who can't get their animals back at the Lied Animal Shelter were first-rate and, so far as I could tell, required serious amounts of legwork. The second piece, in particular, was a topic so observant yet unexamined -- animal shelter workers can be put in harm's way by angry, emotional pet owners -- that it never even occurred to me or Emily to discuss the notion in 188 episodes of "The Petcast." Hopefully we will soon, though.

This is really, really good news. I don't know what happened to Joe to have him produce the kind of stuff that resulted in those really gruesome corrections, but I repeat what I said the very first time I had to point out problems in his coverage: Until then, he had been one of my favorite and most creative local writers and one of the few I could see giving me a serious run for my national freelancing money if he ever decided to try.

Keep it up, Joe. I would've pointed out the Lied story sooner but I usually wait until I have something to say about a few items in the media before making a post of it. Sadly, there's been so little that's really stood out to me lately. Then I find myself two weeks in a row quite impressed by a story by not just the same reporter but by the very one who has received so many barbs here. Hooray.

P.S. to the R-J: As I wrote this, I received two breaking-news Twitters to my cell phone. I'm sorry, but the fact that the AFC divisional playoff is tied at the half and the fact that UNLV and Texas Christian are playing today are not breaking news. Or news at all. Who on Bonanza Road thinks otherwise?!!?

Friess: Comment

Wow, what a surprise to arrive here earlier after being awake for 24 hours of travel to find the kind of battle occurring in the comments of the prior post. I went and deleted the one obscene, completely ridiculous remark and then I wrote a response that Blogger didn't seem to post. That was frustrating, but Miles wouldn't let me rewrite it before we had a "brief" nap which became, well, all day.

I'll try to keep this brief, but I do need to answer remarks made here:

* Re: Steve Sebelius' comment about media criticism in Vegas from the last post: I stand partly corrected and will take his word for it on the points he makes about ad revenues and the history of Matt O'Brien's media column. But it still remains a loss to the community that there is no journalist in this city dedicated to media commentary the way other major cities have the likes of Michael Miner or Howard Kurtz. And it still is left to the Internet to be the more independent voices observing the press rather than the editor of a paper owned by the city's largest newspaper. As hard as Steve works, he is still a top official involved in one of these companies. It's very difficult for him to be seen as truly independent even as he genuinely strives to be.

* My alleged bias against the Sun. Take a good look at this blog. Take a look at all the entries related to the Las Vegas Sun. Here, I'll help you since you wish to make uninformed comments without any backup.  The vast majority of the time, I have great praise for the Sun. My time at the R-J taints me? Why would anything else you have to say be credible when my public record on this is so easy to access and so obviously not as you present it?

* The NYT piece in CityCenter. Yes, I spoke to several public arts experts, including Jack Bender, publisher of the Public Art Review and executive director of Forecast Public Art, as well as Richard Lynch of Americans for the Arts, the leading public-art non-profit. And there were others. But sometimes in journalism we interview lots of people we don't get to quote because (a) there's not enough space and (b) all the experts said pretty much the same thing. And what they said was (a) the MGM project was genuinely impressive in its ambition and scale and (b) it was most certainly public art in the sense that it will exist in spaces that are publicly available to anyone. In fact, that's one reason they're not putting any of it in the CityCenter casino; children can't go there. What's considered "public" is a bit different in Vegas than elsewhere; ordinary people know they can tramp through fancy lobbies and casinos and never feel out of place even if they don't spend a dime because it is customary here for people to do so. I've tried this in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong and was asked by some attendant whether I had a reservation. It's a different world. Furthermore, we journalists do strive for balance. That's why I called on the art critic Joan Altabe  of the Robb Report. She was the most virulently anti-Vegas-for-art in 2002 when I wrote about a Faberge exhibit at the Bellagio and, later, a Monet exhibit. And yet SHE said she was "dazzled" by the CityCenter effort and couldn't wait to come see it. So that felt like an art-world consensus to me that this was a credible and possible game-changing public art effort. That quote, too, was trimmed for space.

* My alleged Vegas-is-tacky posture: See my current Las Vegas Weekly column. I'm the guy in the mainstream media that is very, very quick to take note of unnecessary anti-Vegas bias and inaccuracy. The set-up of the NYT piece on public art actually came directly out of my interview with Maya Lin and two other artists. They were  terribly amused by the idea that they would be the least likely Vegas headliners. It's not anti-Vegas bias to note what the world expects of Vegas -- and I wonder who thought Sinatra was tacky anyhow!?! -- and toy with that.

* Re: Cliched anti-USAT bias: So it's wrong to point out Vegas' traditional history but it's OK to insult hundreds of journalists whose newspaper has vastly improved since, uh, the 1980s? I write longer pieces for USA Today nowadays than I do for the NYT. I am very proud of the pieces I did from China for USAT. The experience of crawling around a country where the press are brutally mistreated with a minimal grip on the language, relying on a network of friends and translators, and being able to turn around textured, lengthy pieces with sourcing from both China and the West (which meant working all night for days sometimes to reach those sources) was a great challenge and a terrific learning opportunity. The USAT staff nowadays is made up of Nieman fellows and Pulitzer winners. To insult its quality because of a 25-year-old reputation is like, well, calling Vegas tacky based in Excalibur.

* A 535-word correction is seriously newsworthy. It is the media's equivalent of a politician being shown to have or having admitted to have exhibited significant incompetence. The media doesn't just shrug when that happens and say, "Oh, OK. Carry on. Thanks for letting us know." Have there been longer? Sure, no doubt. But not that I know of here in Vegas, where I work and observe. And evidently the industry's trade publication, E&P, also saw it as news, which is saying something. And what's more, a newspaper that demands responses from its sources amid controversy has show it does not feel it ought to comment -- even to give a courteous no comment -- amid one of its own. That's hypocrisy, see. And there are many, many questions the public should be asking about the quality of its newspaper and the integrity of its editors in these circumstances. That's not personal any more than any other journalist gets personal covers any other controversy. It's what we do. But we don't often take the time to explain our methods, point out or own worst moments or respond to our readers as I've done here. And, ironically, it is THAT effort that has made people who wish to see a personal vendetta here when, in fact, I have a history prior to this of recommending Joe Schoenmann to editors of major newspapers.

* Back to that Sun bias thing. JeffinOKC is close when he says I make 20 percent of my income from the work I do for two Greenspun publications. It's more like 15 percent. Not a small sum. Which tells you something. I've followed through on this coverage despite knowing that it's vaguely possible that someone could get ticked off and I could lose that important revenue stream. But I do it anyway because I believe it's important. At the very least, I have to believe Joe Schoenmann put more effort into balancing his stories and triple checking his facts knowing my readers and I are watching carefully, and that's good news for everyone -- including Joe. But when was the last time you, oh brave nasty anonymous blog poster, did something that could seriously jeopardize your livelihood just because you felt it was the right thing to do? Never, I'm sure.

* Other bloggers. It is true there are other Vegas bloggers who critique the media, but the generally do it from a serious political perspective. That's a valuable service, but it's not the same as media criticism from a respected journalist with a journalism degree and a lifetime of newsroom experience. Debate that all you want; I stand by my record any day. And other prominent media critics around the country have emailed in recent days to let me know that being accused of being an egomaniac is standard fare for the task.

* Speaking of anonymous blog posts: Some have asked privately why I don't limit this blog's posting abilities. I don't want to do that at this time. The debate is generally healthy, except when it veers into truly offensive language such as what I deleted. I hope nobody thought I was limiting debate by deleting that one notice. It just didn't have any point to it. Well, it showed that whoever was badgering my old editor couldn't win on the merits of a real conversation so he/she went off the wall. But still, it was ugly and unnecessary. I may deputize a friend to delete posts that cross that line while I'm unavailable. Will decide later.

On to dinner in Zurich. Then a little Xanax to readjust the old body clock. Photos coming later!

Other Media Musings...

There's other stuff to get to today beyond Corey Levitan's piece on this blog and whatever else I've got going on. In fact, there's a few things I've overlooked this week so let's get to it.

1. Is it just me or... did this cartoonist make Sarah Palin look like a transsexual?



2. Sheldon Adelson Drops John L. Smith lawsuit. Perhaps he's making a bid for better karma now that his company is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy or maybe someone finally got up the guts to tell him that he's legally off his rocker, but LVS CEO Sheldon Adelson finally pulled the plug on his ill-conceived 2005 libel lawsuit against Review-Journal columnist and author John L. Smith. Smith, who had to file for bankruptcy to cope with the financial burden of all of this even as his daughter continues a dramatic and expensive cancer battle for her life, had already apologized in a variety of ways for his inference in his book "Sharks in the Desert" that Adelson had some organized crime connections.

R-J Editor Thomas Mitchell writes today that Adelson gave up because some confidential records about his background could have been made public if the lawsuit went forward. Either way, it's over for John. And it seems that his way out was thanks largely to Vegas attorney Donald Campbell, whom I profiled as the cover boy of this year's annual Mountain States edition of Super Lawyers magazine. You can read that here.

3. Not All Exits This Week Were Graceful. Liberal political columnist Erin Neff signed off the other day after five years with the R-J's editorial page. She took a buyout. It was her decision. But now she whined to Norm Clarke in today's paper that she felt had to go because she was the token lefty anyway and that she was propelled out the door by the fact that the publisher held her column endorsing Barack Obama for a day prior to the election. Now, I don't know what the rules were for R-J columnists, but I did learn recently that New York Times columnists are not permitted to directly endorse candidates for president. So it's not an uncommon restriction; I guess they're afraid if there are conflicting endorsements from the same newspaper it would lessen the impact of the paper's official imprimatur and confuse people. (Both sides would be able to say "Endorsed by the Daily Whatever.")

But Neff did end up getting to essentially make her endorsement, so I don't know what her fuss is. And, either way, she had chosen to take the buyout anyway, so why suddenly get all haughty about it? That said, I do hope that the R-J continues to have some left-leaning local columnists to maintain the balance.

4. Joe The Correction Writer Strikes Again. I'm not going to belabor this because it's getting to be silly and, besides, someone at the Sun may try to gin up a fake controversy against me again if I go too far. But. Our old friend Joe Schoenmann was responsible for yet another very lengthy correction this week, this time a 140-worder that appeared in the Nov. 4 edition of the newspaper. (Remember this 535-word one?) It regards an Oct. 26 piece. But the Sun did not see fit to post the correction on the Internet OR to at least to fix the mistakes in the Web version of the story, so I've done them the service of typing it in:

The Sun’s Oct. 26 “Answers About Clark County Government” contained errors in the segment regarding a report about the North Las Vegas Airport. During the Oct. 21 County Commission meeting, Commissioner Lawrence Weekly, not Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, said that errant pilots should be punished for accidents just as errant motorists are. The airport accident statistics in the story were also incorrect, in part because of errors in the transcript on the county’s Web site. Randall Walker, county aviation director, told the commission that since 2003 there had been only one accident out of 3.3 million “operations,” meaning takeoffs and landings, at McCarran International Airport. In the same period, Henderson Executive Airport had three accidents and 426,000 takeoffs and landings, or one accident for every 142,000 operations. At North Las Vegas Airport, the ratio was one accident for every 62,000 operations.

Hey, Sun folks, how about letting your readers know the OTHER part of why these errors happened? Could it be because your reporter was relying in his reporting not on interviews or actual attendance at public meetings of the body he covers? I once did this job, covering the Clark County Commission. Those meetings are a snooze, no doubt. But it still helps to actually go to them if you're going to write about them. Otherwise, you might as well save some money and outsource this coverage to India, as that newspaper in California did.

Media Muddle: KNPR, Bornfeld, Electric Daisy Cartoons

It's Sunday and I've got tons of writing to do, which means that I'll set it aside as usual to muse. Loads and loads of stuff:

* We expect our media critics to be forthright. But on Thursday, when Steve Bornfeld of the Review-Journal announced the end of his Mediaology column, which analyzed the local TV news universe, he did so with this bizarre and ridiculous statement:

[T]he issues [this column] addresses are finite. Believing they're infinite would result in increasingly strident, repetitive columns. Readers and TV pros deserve better.

Uh, what? He's run out of news? Can you imagine if Norm Clarke said, "You know, every original celebrity scandal that's ever happened has happened, so I don't want to bore you all anymore. Bye!" Or if Jon Ralston said, "These elections are so frigging repetitive. Someone wins, someone loses, people get mean, people lie. How boring. I'm done!" Or maybe Howard Stutz might perk up one day and say, "The earnings go up, the earnings go down, they keep having these poker tournaments, so what, we've got the gaming thing fully covered. Let's move on, shall we?"

The TV news business is a perpetual news machine of its own. The personalities, decisions and circumstances -- especially in a rapidly changing era of media -- present endless stories, reasons to opine, worthwhile topics to delve into and important matters to continue to explain to readers/viewers about how and why the news as it is. Every time a major story breaks, someone independent ought to assess how it was managed by the medium that still provides the most information to the most numbers of people. There is so much wrong with local TV news it makes my head explode, and Bornfeld barely scratched the surface. Yet after just three years, Bornfeld can't come up with anything more to say? What?

Nope, not buying it. Something else is happening here. Maybe he's personally just tired of doing it, which is fine but don't pretend like the entire pursuit is no longer worthy or valuable. Maybe the newspaper decided the space could be better used for more advice columns and puzzles, which we'll find out soon enough. Maybe, having fired staffer Corey Levitan, the Features Section decided they needed Bornfeld to pick up slack elsewhere, and the one thing that needed to go before he snapped was this. But to say, "Hey, we did it all! Nothing left to see!" is inane and disingenuous. Any journalist with that little creativity should leave the business altogether, and I don't believe Bornfeld is that guy. Yet since he's writing a column about the MEDIA BUSINESS in which he has certainly advocated transparency, this dud of a swan song is especially pathetic.

[Disclosure: I generally do not comment on the local TV news biz because my partner is an executive at KSNV, Channel 3, so it's awkward and compromising. While some suggest I have a bias in my print-media commentary toward Greenspun Media because I write a column for GMG's Las Vegas Weekly, I suspect the likes of Ralston, Joe Schoenmann, Robin Leach, Delen Goldberg, David McGrath Schwartz, John Katsilometes and others would agree I haven't laid off on GMG when the spirit moves me.]

* Speaking of the TV, I was on it on Friday with KSNV's Jim Snyder discussing the hullabaloo surrounding the Electric Daisy Carnival at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Here's my part:

So far, so good with EDC, by the by. No serious injuries or hospitalizations to speak of.

* Tangentially, I was fascinated to find this cartoon about the EDC on the R-J's editorial page:


(It's four frames, so I've excerpted it for the purposes of illustration as I didn't want to be sued for providing the whole thing.)

It's worth noting because at first I thought this meant that Las Vegas jitters over EDC had scored so high on the national radar that a political cartoonist had opted to make fun of it. And not just any, but Ted Rall, a nationally syndicated cartoonist who is presently the president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He's also an award-winning columnist.

So I looked around online to find the cartoon and see where else it had run. I couldn't find it. So I went back to look more closely and I found this...


...in between panels. Which means the R-J had commissioned Rall to draw this specifically for the newspaper. I had reported a few months ago that the R-J had fired its longtime political cartoonist, Jim Day, and bemoaned the expected lack of cartoons commenting on local issues since then. So I'm fascinated by the notion that the R-J is evidently paying syndicated cartoonists -- and very prominent ones -- from outside the city to do Vegas-related work.

* In today's column, Greenspun Publisher Brian Greenspun says out loud what I've been saying for years regarding why the Las Vegas Sun faced its massive layoffs and suffered such internal strife. You'll recall that I criticized a Las Vegas CityLife cover story by Amy Kingsley that basically suggested the paper's woes were brought on by internal conflicts between the print and online sides and suggested that it was the company's money-bleeding -- perhaps because of a failed online strategy -- that led to workforce reductions.

I argued -- and then-publisher Geoff Schumacher slapped back harsh at me -- that Kingsley's piece missed the point, failed to take into account the entire situation and was ultimately a failure. To respond to Schumacher, who felt the story was just dandy as it was, I wrote:

Kingsley's piece makes many assumptions about why Greenspun Media Group hit its rocky shoal, all of them focusing on journalism. Schumacher does the same. What Kingsley overlooked and Schumacher forgets is that the Sun has never been a profitable publication, not when Hank Greenspun started it and probably not for the vast majority of its life including recent years. And definitely not when they won their Pulitzer.

The Las Vegas Sun and most of the GMG publications have been propped up for all this time by the Greenspun family fortune. It is only because THAT has faltered that suddenly economic realities have hit them. Sure, 702.tv was an abject failure and yes, there are disgruntled people, but the Greenspuns are heavily invested in THREE businesses that have fallen apart right when Curley & Co were trying to make their big splash: Real estate (American Pacific), gaming (Station Casinos) and media (Tribune Co as well as GMG publications).

In today's column, Greenspun praises George Maloof for sticking with The Palms and not declaring bankruptcy or using the other easier ways to reorganize and paper over his business problems. Along the way, he tossed in this nugget:

By way of full disclosure, my family has not escaped the bludgeoning that has been leveled without discrimination across the country. Actually, the heartache has been disproportionately felt in those areas that relied on real estate and gaming. Throw in the media collapse, and it appears that my family hit the triple jackpot.

Ta-da! THAT is why his family reduced their workforce, shut down CineVegas, rejiggered all sorts of things. Not because the guy running the online department had singlehandedly run the enterprise into the ground, as Kingsley shouted from her cover story. But because, as I said before, the losses on every front were so grave they decided they couldn't bleed THAT MUCH from their media holdings. That was the story then, and CityLife missed it.

* Two random pieces from the Sunday paper that intrigued me:

• Sonya Padgett's feature on all the folks who sell water and art on the pedestrian bridges on the Strip. People make $1,000 a day reselling bottles of water in the summer? Holy cow.
• Paul Harasim's piece on the fact that not a single Nevada pharmacy has participated in a two-year-old program that asks them to donate unused cancer medication to a pill bank for those who can't afford them.
  

* Big congrats to KNPR and its crew for the 2,000th episode Friday of the indispensable local talk program State of Nevada. Host Dave Becker had me, R-J columnist John L. Smith and frequent host Ian Mylchreest on to assess Vegas as it stands and peer into the crystal ball about what happens next. I was honored to have been asked, and you can hear that episode here.

As I left the studio, I told KNPR General Manager Flo Rogers they should re-air the very first episode of the show or put it in the podcast feed, and she told me it is available in their online archives. I believe she may be mistaken, as I went to look so I could provide the link and the earliest episode available is from Oct. 31, 2003. It's clearly not the first***, as the commentary from Robert Fielden references previous requests for feedback from listeners. It's also available only for playing on Real Player. Here's hoping that for history and curiosity's sake, they go ahead and post their first episode and make it downloadable.

***UPDATE: Flo Rogers says the 10/31/03 episode is, in fact, the first hour of State of Nevada. I haven't listened to all of it to see if that is ever acknowledged on the air, but I will do so soon.

The Post-Mortem On ChickenWingsGate

It's been a full week since the Las Vegas Sun decided that a couple of poorly chosen words about the 40/40 Club's demise on this blog qualified as a news story. It's time I offer some thoughts about what happened.

It was all very strange when Sun editor Tom Gorman called Friday for a couple of reasons. Gorman was for many years the L.A. Times' entire Las Vegas bureau. I've always had tremendous respect for him and I've admired much of the tack the Sun has taken towards contemplative journalism since his arrival. But why would a top editor who generally does not cover the news call me? And why did the paper post an article about a controversial topic without an actual byline when bylines are most important for transparency when the coverage is of a controversial topic? Did it really take the entire "Sun Staff" -- or even more than one person? -- to cover something as small as what a blogger wrote?

Gorman confused me from the start by asking about the big controversy surrounding my post. Up until that moment, I'd not known there was one. My 40/40 post was three days old when he called and, at that stage, I'd received a few comments on the blog agreeing with my views on the 40/40 Club's demise and not a single email about it from anyone aggrieved by the racial content.

Gorman's claim defied the laws of the Internet. If this were a big deal, I'd have been swarmed by angry people writing angry comments and emails. Activists know how to mobilize people in this era to make their voices heard. Nobody did so. Richard Abowitz disagreed with my take and its racial dimension on his L.A. Times blog, but he didn't suggest I had been offensive.

I was genuinely surprised, particularly when Gorman said such people as State. Sen. Steven Horsford were angry about the chicken-wings line. Horsford had spent the week in Denver for the DNC and surely couldn't have known or cared about this without someone avidly pursuing his take. When I explained where I'd really been coming from -- that I was thinking "sports bar food" not "black food" -- Gorman actually started debating me about it.

I knew then a hit job was underway. I chose from that point on to answer via email where I could be more confident that my words would not later be twisted for the Sun's purposes.

So what were the Sun's purposes? Well, there's lots of speculation about that. The prevailing theory? Take a look at which Sun reporter I've criticized the most by clicking here and then look at who shares the byline of this story from the 8/29 newspaper about black-leader reaction to Obama's big speech. On Thursday, someone who hates me is chatting up black leaders; Friday the same black leaders are pissed about a blog they've never read by a writer they've never heard of. Coincidence?

Could there be clumsier, more obvious and more journalistically suspect effort to fulfill a vendetta? It is shocking to me -- maybe not to many others who don't understand how legitimate newsrooms actually operate, but to me -- that a top editor would participate in such a dubious effort. I've great respect for most Sun staffers and, on balance, the media criticism in this blog has been far more positive than negative towards the newspaper.

Calling black leaders to gin up a racial scandal is extremely offensive and cynical, as much to the black leaders being used in this ploy as to me. Had a black activist called THEM to complain, perhaps they might have something. But building an entire story around reading bits of a blog post? That's a pathetic waste of journalistic resources.

That said, I was still in the wrong. The wording I used was not intentionally racist, but it was careless and glib and, ultimately, could reasonably be read in an offensive racist context. So I failed because I did not communicate well and I didn't consider carefully enough what I was saying.

So what did I do? Well, first, I owned up to my mistake publicly and explained myself. It's ironic that the Sun would be the ones to prompt me to do so, given that when the Joe Schoenmann scandal erupted these watchdogs of the public good felt absolutely no obligation to the public to explain how their reporter had been permitted to glibly smear -- as racists, no less! -- an entire community of Las Vegas. I couldn't get a comment out of anyone at the Sun about that matter -- not even a no-comment response! -- but I live by my creed and I responded anyway to Gorman and then to the public.

I also took to heart the teachings of modern black and white leaders, including that biracial fellow who might become our 44th president. I called each of the people in the Sun piece to personally apologize and explain myself. Dialogue, they say, is how we learn, teach and heal. And in the cases of Assemblyman Harvey Munford and the Rev. Robert Fowler, it was a pleasant exchange. I did not, by week's end, manage to get Sen. Horsford on the phone, but we did exchange email and he even posted a kind comment on this blog. Only the biggest flame-thrower in the Sun piece, UNLV Afro-American Studies Prof. Rainier Spencer, who compared me to Fuzzy Zoeller, decided that such dialogue is fruitless: "I appreciate the invitation but don't really see the point." Uh, OK.

I also went out on Monday evening for chicken wings with another black activist. No, that's not a joke. Alex Dixon, 27, invited me on the blog and so I went. Dixon had also been perturbed by what seemed like stereotypical language but then was appreciative of my later post. And he had another theory for why the 40/40 Club failed: The chicken wings sucked. “To make amends, I offer to share a Vegas classic: six hot wings a smooth draft and $2 for video poker at a PT’s Pub of your choice,” he wrote.

Seemed like a good time. So we had our wings – with Diet Cokes and sans video poker – and spent an hour or so mulling issues of racism, the media and politics. We also noticed the similarities of our lives as young minority professionals, him as black and me as Jewish and gay. I made a new friend and I left pleased that we aren't so polarized that we're unable to actually talk, explain ourselves, share our experiences. Also, the wings were among the best I've had in years and are now a constant craving of mine.

A final footnote. On Sunday, I was contacted by a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal who was working on a piece for Monday's newspaper on this flap. But then it turned out that they chose not to publish whatever story was cooking. I can't know why, but I suspect that as critical as I've been of some aspects of the R-J, someone over there had a clearer head than the folks at the Sun and realized that this just wasn't an actual news story.

So, hopefully, this is over. And I've learned a thing or two. I don’t imagine the folks at the Sun who chose to invent this so-called controversy would have expected an outcome like that.