R-J's Angle Suit Tops Top Journalism Blog

OK, so the headline above is a little off, as the R-J hasn't endorsed the Republican candidate ... yet. But Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute, the world's original media-watching blogger, prominently highlighted this morning my PoliticsDaily.Com piece posted over the weekend that raises three critical questions for the Review-Journal and Nevada politicians going forward now that the R-J front company Righthaven LLC has taken the unprecedented step of suing (for anything) a major-party candidate in the heart of an election season:

* Must Nevada's largest paper now include a passage in every news story it does on Angle's race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledging that its owners have sued her?

* Can the R-J, whose publisher and editor have been outspoken supporters of the Tea Party darling, actually endorse her for Senate after having publicly accused her of stealing from them?

* Will they sue candidates who reproduce their endorsements in other races, long a de rigueur campaign practice?

My favorite part of the piece is UNLV J-School prof Mary Hausch on how exactly Shermy Sherm & The Funky Bunch will address the lawsuit in their forthcoming endorsement of Angle: "I guess they could say, 'We think she's a thief, but we like her a lot.' "

Let's see how long Editor Tom Mitchell and Sherm Frederick can duck the journalistic questions herein, if they can sober up long enough to remember that that's what their enterprise is actually supposed to be about. What I'd love is for Brooke Gladstone or Bob Garfield to cross-examine them on NPR's "On The Media." More than likely, the Bonanza Road bosses are much too craven to subject themselves to that or will squawk about "pending litigation" or, best option yet, turn it over to their journalistically clueless PR disaster, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson. (Gibson didn't appear on Dave Berns' Nevada Today talk show on KUNV on Thursday, claiming he was tired of talking about this in the media.)

By the way, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has removed its R-J stories from its site since I made mention of it here on Sept. 3. And Steve Green of the Sun reports today two more entities settled confidentially, including the prominent blog Sweetness & Light. S&L owner Steven Gilbert -- goodness there are too many Steve/ns involved in this story, although not the thin-skinned one who prizes himself as a (cough) crack TV investigative journo and editor of a (cough) muckraking (cough) alt-weekly -- offered up this:

When a reader asked Gilbert, "What’s to keep them from tapping you again and again?," Gilbert wrote: "I have blocked all of their current holdings from my various browsers and they are blacklisted on S&L. I would advise anyone with an Internet site to do the same."

Can someone explain to me technically how that would work? Does this mean that R-J reporters at work can't access that website? And does this really and truly mean that the R-J has sued itself altogether out of view of one of the Web's largest conservative audiences?

"Gambling is worse than crack because it's mental"

See, she lacked self-control and that's not her fault. Hell, her losses are a conspiracy! Read on...


ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey (March 8) AP - She was an ambitious lawyer and TV commentator who started going to Atlantic City casinos to relax, and soon was getting high-roller treatment that included limousines whisking her to the resort city.

Arelia Margarita Taveras says she was even allowed to bring her dog, Sasha, to the blackjack tables, sitting in her purse.

But her gambling spun out of control: She said she would go days at a time at the tables, not eating or sleeping, brushing her teeth with disposable wipes so she did not have to leave.

She says her losses totaled nearly $1 million.

Now she is chasing the longest of long shots: a $20 million racketeering lawsuit in federal court against six Atlantic City casinos and one in Las Vegas, claiming they had a duty to notice her compulsive gambling problem and cut her off.

"They knew I was going for days without eating or sleeping," Taveras said. "I would pass out at the tables. They had a duty to care of me. Nobody in their right mind would gamble for four or five straight days without sleeping."

Experts say her case will be difficult to prove, but it provides an unusually detailed window into the life of a problem gambler.

"It's like crack, only gambling is worse than crack because it's mental," said Taveras, 37, a New Yorker who now lives in Minnesota. "It creeps up on you, the impulse. It's a sickness."

She lost her law practice, her apartment, her parents' home, and owes the IRS $58,000. She said she even considered swerving into oncoming traffic to kill herself.

In interviews with The Associated Press, Taveras admitted she dipped into her clients' escrow accounts to finance her gambling habit. She was disbarred last June, and faces criminal charges stemming from those actions, but is trying to work out restitution agreements in order to avoid a prison term.

Her lawsuit names Resorts Atlantic City, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, the Tropicana Casino Resort, the Showboat Casino Hotel, Bally's Atlantic City, as well as the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The casinos deny any wrongdoing, maintaining in court papers that Taveras brought her problems on herself. Casino representatives either declined to comment for this report or did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Read the rest here.


Thoughts? I've often wondered how the casinoes have kept themselves out of court while gun manufacturers, cigarette companies and taverns all have been creamed in court. I mean, it's not like there's any shortage of money-sucking attorneys in Vegas.

Of course, it looks like this particular test case is a bit flawed as the plaintiff is an attorney with a bit of an checkered history anyhow. Apparently she's been charged with stealing money from the survivors of 9/11 victims. Nice.

Something to Consider When Booking a Vegas Room

John L. Smith is probably the finest working writer in Las Vegas and, as it happens, also a terrifically nice person. He occupies the bottom strip of the Review-Journal's Nevada section a few times a week and we'd all be better off if he could do so even more often. He's a lifelong Las Vegan -- yes, there are a couple of those -- with terrific sources and a storehouse of good will built up over decades of storytelling, a wonderful and rare blend of hard-hitting expose and tear-inducing human drama.

And none of that is able to protect him from the misery he's going through now. John filed for bankruptcy protection last week, forced into the move not by the crushing financial burden of his young daughter's three-year battle against cancer but by what amounts to an incredibly frivilous libel lawsuit filed against him by billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

John made some mistakes about Adelson in his 2005 book on Vegas titans, "Sharks in the Desert." Adelson was upset by suggestions that he might have some connection to organized crime and sued both Smith and his publisher, Barricade Books. Smith acknowledges the mistakes and inserted an errata sheet in copies of the books. He also apologized for the mistakes in his Review-Journal column.

That would seem like a reasonable -- heck, possibly excessive -- attempt to fix the problem. Except that the lawsuit wasn't withdrawn. The various and sundry debates of both sides in this mess can be read about in this news story from Friday and also in this superb column by editor Thomas Mitchell. As Mitchell notes, it doesn't matter if any journalism law professor can point out flaws in Adelson's case, the facts that Smith made several good-faith efforts to correct the record and that Adelson can't point to any damage suffered from the book. None of that matters because Adelson has expensive lawyers who must know the flaws of the case but figure they can bleed Smith into submission or, in this case, financial purgatory. And we thought Republicans were opposed to abusing the legal system in this manner!

Of course, it's all made the worse because Smith is enduring a private horror that would prompt most kindhearted people to back off, his only child's hellish battle against cancer. In fact, it is this battle and John's willingness to share it with his readers that has prompted my own partner, Miles, to pledge to grow out his hair and donate it to a charity that makes wigs for people balded by disease and its treatments.

Adelson's lawyer offered a $200,000 trust for Smith's daughter's treatment even as the two were in litigation. Smith could accept that, but it would mean he'd also be giving up his ability to objectively cover one of the most significant business interests in the city. That may be a tough one for non-journalists to get their heads around, but it's a principled stand and one that I, frankly, am not entirely sure I'd have to honor to take in the face of such a personal crisis.

I'll happily believe Adelson made this offer out of real empathy and may not understand the journalistic bind it would create for Smith. And I don't deny that Adelson has the right to be upset if Smith wrote something inaccurate that could taint his image.

But assuming that the entire matter boils down to Adelson wanting to protect his good name, it's confusing that Adelson would want all of his fine philanthropic work to be overshadowed by his lack of benevolence toward Smith in just letting the thing go. Which would seem to be the worse image problem, a widely disproved connection to organized crime many decades ago that few would even have known about were it not for this lawsuit or the fast-traveling -- and true -- news that an unfathomably wealthy man is forcing a working-class father with a sick child into bankruptcy?

Smith, meanwhile, continues to conduct himself with his standard good taste. Today's column doesn't mention the lawsuit directly even though, if you know about it, you can read between the lines. Rather, it happens to be three years this week since Amelia was first diagnosed, so he uses it to remind himself and us of his daughter's sweetness and bravery. They're now in one of many limbos, a month away from yet another pronouncement about the child's survival.

Read it now, with tissues.

Vegas, Disabilities and the Hard of Hearing (Like Me!)

The Department of Justice today released information on a settlement with two casinos, the Mandalay Bay in Vegas and the Circus Circus in Mississippi, both now owned by MGM Mirage.

The settlements are exhaustive and the Vegas end of it involves Mandalay paying a $30,000 fine (whoop-de-doo) and enacting a long list of physical alterations to accommodate people in wheelchairs that undoubtedly will be a road map for compliance used by every other property in the city. Accessible rooms must have 32-inch-wide doorways, public bathrooms have to be however wide, they must provide accessible rooms for most every level of room style, etc. The Alain Ducasse eatery Mix was singled out as needing to provide a way for people in wheelchairs to get to upstairs dining areas. You can read it for yourself at this link until May 5.

So here's my complaint: What about those of us with disabilities not related to being unable to walk? In all of this, the only thing that touches on, say, people with hearing loss, is a requirement that they provide visual fire alarms in rooms.

I go to a lot of shows. I estimate fewer than a quarter of theaters on the Strip offer hearing assistive devices for their patrons. Every single cinema and Broadway theater does, but in Vegas, almost nobody bothers when they're spending tens of millions building them to include this convenience for their deaf and hard of hearing audience members. The theater that Rita Rudner was in -- and now Roseanne Barr is chilling in for a time -- at New York-New York was the first I ever saw that actually had signage for it, and I think the Cirque shows may have it which is ironic because you don't have to understand anybody's talking when you see one of them.

What's more, some that do have amplification devices don't advertise it. You have to ask. And then the ushers and box office personnel typically are baffled and don't know whether it's available or not. Nobody's training them. And I'm a young, assertive New Yorker/journalist; most of those looking for such things are elderly and not terribly comfortable even asking in the first place.

I particularly loved this response from an usher at the Gordie Brown show at the Venetian: "No, we don't have that, but it's really loud." It would be funny if I didn't hear this answer almost every time the answer turns out to be "no."

Don't tell me what's loud and what isn't. If I could hear like you, I wouldn't be asking, y'know?