Back in December 2015, New Media Investments, also known informally as Gatehouse Media, sold the ReviewJournal to News + Media Capital Group LLC at almost 3 times the value of the paper. And, the sale was secretive. Sheldon Adleson, casino mogul,  is principal backer of News + Media Capital Group LLC

 It’s inarguably 1 that Adelson is a major partisan political donor. He provided $100 million in political funding in 2012, largely aimed at defeating Barack Obama, and another estimated $14 million in 2014 midterm elections. (In 2014, let’s note that he wasoutspent two-to-one by Michael Bloomberg.)

One troubling data point for those concerned about unbiased coverage: Adelson isn’t a neophyte newspaper owner. In 2007, Adelson founded the free Israel Hayom. In 2014, he purchased Makor Rishon, an Israeli religious paper. Both papers prominently support the government of Bibi Netanyahu, and Adelson is a strong backer of the Israeli government’s current policies. Haaretz, considered by many the most respected Israeli news source, wrote a piece about Adelson last year titled “Sheldon Adelson’s Culture of Hate. If anyone said about Jews what the American Jewish billionaire says about Palestinians, he’d be considered a Jew-hater in the same league as Farrakhan and Ahmadinejad.”

Further, in 2014, Adelson spoke to the Israeli American Council in New York City. One topic: How to affect the U.S. dialogue about Israel by buying the influential New York Times.

“There’s only one way to buy it. Money.” he said, as reported by The Daily Beast. Noting the difficulty of such a purchase, given the Times’ two-class ownership structure, he further said a buyer would have to “pay significantly more than it’s worth.” (Hat tip to the Times). That’s apparently what he’s now done to buy Nevada’s biggest paper.

At about the same time the sale was being finalized, a case involving Adelson was being heard in Las Vegas. 

Just over a month before Sheldon Adelson's family was revealed as the new owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, three reporters at the newspaper received an unusual assignment passed down from the newspaper's corporate management: Drop everything and spend two weeks monitoring all activity of three Clark County judges.

The reason for the assignment and its unprecedented nature was never explained.

One of the three judges observed was District Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez, whose current caseload includes Jacobs v. Sands, a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit filed against Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., by Steven Jacobs, who ran Sands' operations in Macau.

The case has attracted global media attention because of Jacobs' contention in court filings that he was fired for trying to break the company's links to Chinese organized crime triads, and allegations that Adelson turned a blind eye to prostitution and other illegal activities in his resorts there.

So where was the case written about? Las Vegas? Nope. Connecticut

None of the 15,000 words the reporters wrote about their time sitting in courtrooms was ever published by the Review-Journal, but days later a long article blasting Gonzalez's rulings in the Sands case appeared in a small Connecticut newspaper with a connection to Adelson that became known only last week.

To add to this whole bizarre mess, apparently reporters in Florida in one of the newspaper outlets Gatehouse owned, were asked to do that judges investigation; this was before the assignment was forced on the LV reporters

After all this started coming to light, Michael Reed of New Media Investments, tried to tamp down the story. 

So, were journalists being used as a hit squad by Adelson against the judges? This article, by Jay Rosen,  has a lot of really good questions regarding the whole deal, as well as some connect-the-dots speculation. Read the whole thing, looks really smarmy. Part

Fact: David Arkin’s bosses were even less helpful. From the Review-Journal’s Dec. 18 story:

Whether there was a link between the GateHouse-ordered court monitoring assignment, the critical article in New Britain and the sale of the R-J to the Adelson family remains unclear.

Michael Reed, CEO of New Media Investment Corp., the parent company of GateHouse Media, declined to comment when asked whether Adelson was involved in the court monitoring directive. He said the effort was part of a “multistate, multinewsroom” investigative effort initiated by GateHouse, but said he did not know who started it or how it was approved.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to create a story where there isn’t one,” Reed told an RJ reporter on Wednesday. “I would be focusing on the positive, not the negative.”

(My italics.) Notice how the company’s top guy did know about a “multistate, multinewsroom” investigation, but did not know where it came from, or who authorized it. And he declined all comment on whether Adelson was involved. Mark Fabiani, the fixer hired by the Adelsons to handle the national press attention that has come to this story, has twice declined to answer that question when the New York Times put it to him. (Like, Arkin he wouldn’t even call the reporter back.) What does that tell you?

It tells me that truthful answers are too toxic, and deceptive ones stand a risk of being exposed by other parties. But again, that’s my opinion, not something I know for certain. One more thing: Arkin claimed GateHouse had “no knowledge of the prospective new buyer” in November of 2015. But Michael Schroeder told the Review-Journal newsroom the deal had been in the works since the spring of 2015! Arkin’s statement would be appear to be dead on arrival. To me these are signs of desperation. 

New York Times

The Review-Journal has a libertarian bent, and its editorial page agrees with Mr. Adelson on some issues. But it has also been unstinting in its news coverage of him, including articles on the lawsuit being overseen by Judge Gonzalez.

The paper’s publisher, Jason Taylor, now requires reporters and editors to get written permission before any article regarding The Review-Journal or Mr. Adelson’s purchase of it is published.

It is not clear whether Mr. Taylor has been instructed to do so, and he declined to comment. Nor was it clear, staff members said, whether Mr. Adelson and his family had been directly orchestrating matters since the sale. It could be the case, they said, that the paper’s management or Mr. Adelson’s aides had been acting pre-emptively to satisfy what they thought Mr. Adelson, known to be a demanding and exacting man, may have wanted.

Politico-Jan 2016

Kirk Davis, COO of New Media and CEO of Gatehouse Media LLC, has been publicly quiet, though associates say he now understands the depth of the controversy. Mike Reed, New Media Investment Group’s CEO and the company’s chief acquisitor, has so far shown himself to be tone-deaf to the multiple controversies. Largely declining comment, he told the Review-Journal little. It reported its conversation this way: “He also sidestepped when asked if his company or the casino mogul had already influenced editorial decisions made by Review-Journal Publisher Jason Taylor. ‘I don't have a comment on that,’ Reed told a reporter. ‘My recommendation is focus your energy on making the brand stronger.’"

A newspaper brand, though, is nothing without the trust of its readers or its community, and that trust has been put into question.

Considering editor Hengel’s abrupt December departure, and his warning of an adversarial relationship with its new owner, Gatehouse must move quickly to appoint a respected editor, known for journalistic integrity. Further it owes the wider community – in Las Vegas and nationally – a set of basic principles, putting in public writing the commonsense standards of fairness that drive, though unevenly, American daily journalism. Finally, it should publish a public accounting of the December mess.

PS. New Media Investment Corp owns the Glen Rose Reporter.