What All The Fuss Is About

The professional, four-camera HD-quality video from "Las Vegas Celebrates The Music of Michael Jackson" remains out of reach for the moment as Erich needs to make time to go work with the company that shot it on post-production, but demand has been quite high for some -- any! -- quality video of Elijah Johnson's stunning performance in last Saturday's show at the Pearl.

Well, thanks to KLAS-TV's willingness to provide their raw footage, we now have this. You can download it from TheStripPodcast.Com or watch it on YouTube:



Because it's news footage and not a static shot, obviously you miss a lot and there are strange camera motions and focus-unfocus bits. But it certainly gives you a flavor of what we all saw and why Elijah's dad's phone has been ringing off the hook since the Today Show used a snippet in a report on the benefit.

Nicely done, Mr. Knapp!

I don't ordinarily wade into commentary about the local TV news because my partner, Miles, is the executive producer at KVBC, the NBC affiliate here. That makes it difficult and awkward and, happily, the Review-Journal's Steve Bornfeld has his "Mediaology" column analyzing the topic so I don't have to.

But it's a pretty big deal that George Knapp of KLAS, the local CBS affiliate, has won a George Foster Peabody Award this week for their special, "Crossfire: Water, Power and Politics," a hard-hitting analysis of the impact of growth on the southwestern U.S. You can view all seven parts via this LasVegasNow.Com link. Also honored was Knapp's photojournalist, Matt Adams.

To get an idea of what a huge deal this is -- it's the equal to the R-J winning a Pulitzer -- consider who else got Peabody honors this year: ABC for "Lost," HBO for "The Gates" and "John Adams," NBC for its Beijing Olympics coverage, PBS for "Washington Week With Gwen Ifill" and CNN for its coverage of the presidential primaries.

Congrats, Mr. Knapp. Let's hope your station can continue to spend this kind of money on this kind of journalism in these, you know, tough economic times.

The Wynns make it official

It's official. The Wynns filed their divorce petition in Clark County District Court today. KLAS-TV says Steve Wynn filed it, but it's unclear how they could know if the case is sealed. Which it is, per Nevada law allowing either party in a divorce to seal the case. So there'll be no juicy details to share, much to the tabloid media's great disappointment. No matter, they'll probably just make it up anyway!

The Wynns were married in 1963, divorced in 1986 and remarried in 1991. Last month, Elaine Wynn told me she was "doing just great."

Mr. Mayor Backs Down...Sorta

Mayor Oscar Goodman had an animated (is there any other word for anything involving him?) press conference today that I may post as a podcast because it gives you some insight into why this mayor and city are different than any other. (He starts with a recap of his public activities in recent weeks which includes all his press interviews and discusses that the presser has to be shorter than usual because he has to go hang out with some Sports Illustrated models. It's entertaining listening, as city officials go.)

Anyhow, the mayor spoke early about his continued demand that President Obama clarify his Indiana statements which evidently have been taken by many to suggest that businesses ought not hold conventions here. Regardless of whether that's what the president said -- the transcript does not seem to reflect that -- it does seem to be how it's been taken.

Yet when I asked him whether a clarification and an apology were the same thing, he said no and then acknowledged that his call for an apology was a mistake. He sort of claimed he didn't have all the information when he said that and seemed to suggest he was trapped by KLAS's Edward Lawrence into the remark. That's all interesting because as of last night when the Mayor appeared on Fox News, he was still saying he wanted an apology. And that came after the Las Vegas Sun posted a piece yesterday that said he was backing down on the apology request. So it seems to depend who's asking and what time of day.

Still, he wants a clarification from the president that Las Vegas is a legitimate place to come to hold business meetings and conventions and he even conceded that perhaps using bailout money to hold junkets and have leisure trips isn't the right way to go.

One reporter asked what he'd do if Obama didn't respond to him. His giggly answer, "I'll cry."

Mr. Mayor is on Lou Dobbs's CNN show tonight, from what I hear. And he was referred to as Oscar Goldman by Rush Limbaugh yesterday. Don't know if there's a transcript of that out there somewhere -- not sure what El Rushbo was saying although I suspect he was probably crowing about dissension between Democrats -- but Goodman joked about it when I stumbled and almost called him that myself during the press conference.

Ginning Up Controversy

Mayor Oscar Goodman is pipin' mad at President Obama and the local media is all over it. Here's KLAS's Eddie Lawrence, for example, and Ben Spillman of the Review-Journal.

Except that the premise of both those stories and Goodman's outrage are false.

Obama was responding to a question about corporate responsibility in an appearance in Indiana. Among the recent reports to catch notice was Wells Fargo's plan, later canceled after a public shaming, to go on a lavish junket to the Wynn after taking a huge government bailout. This was a so-called "appreciation" event, an effort to reward high-achieving employees. That seemed extravagant to some when the banks are taking huge publicly funded bailouts, so it fit the narrative of automaker CEOs flying private jets to their Congressional begging session and the like.

Here's what Obama said: "You can't get corporate jets, you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime."

Yet all of these stories make it sound like Obama offered a full-throated assault on the entire Vegas convention industry. He said nothing about holding meetings or conventions in Las Vegas. He spoke about this in the context of extravagances, of leisure activities. The Wells Fargo event wasn't a meeting or a conference. They weren't planning to do any business. They were going to vacate and indulge, presumably for a job well done even though it's hard for many to see who could deserve it considering these companies' dire straits.

I'm not opining about who's right or wrong here. Dave Schwartz of UNLV makes an interesting case in favor of such trips and John L. Smith in the Review-Journal yesterday was satirically brutal about the same.

But the mayor is complaining about something that never happened, and the local press is filling out the details by allowing the mayor to take the president out of context. True, Goldman Sachs, also a bailout baby, moved a business meeting at the Mandalay Bay to a Marriott in San Francisco out of fear of looking bad. But that's not something the president himself said and so far, it's one example and still within the banking sphere.

Funny thing is, in the process the mayor may actually be endangering the convention business himself. By ginning this up, by turning it into something Drudge-worthy, he's introducing to many meeting planners and companies a thought that hadn't crossed or become firm in their minds: "Will it look bad if we hold this thing in Vegas this year?"

Before the mayor's outrage, I suspect most folks knew that Obama was talking about junkets and excess. Now, I wonder if the stigma has been amplified 100 times over.