Eric Schulzke (b. 1965) is an American political scientist, journalist, and nonprofit founder whose working life crosses three fields that rarely meet in one biography. He trained as a scholar of American political thought. He earned a doctorate in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, completed in the fall of 2002. He then built a career that joins the study of political ideas, the daily practice of journalism, and the founding of a reentry charity for former prisoners. The combination gives his profile an unusual shape. He belongs to no single guild.
I remember Eric as brilliant, moral and funny while Rob struck me as a good man with great people skills and an open heart. Both of them mastered the alliance game at an early age, while I couldn’t help going my own way, losing friends in the pursuit of stories and interests.
Our journalism teacher Bob Burge wrote in my 1984 Yearbook that no other student had challenged him as much as I did.
Eric tried several times to pull me back to the reality of alliances. When I insisted on writing a particular story he opposed, Eric asked me, “Do you consider me your friend?” I said yes. He followed up, “Did I defend you when the Beast Bunch (the football team’s offensive line) wanted to kill you?” I said yes. “Then how can you do this?” I accepted his point.
All sorts of things that normal people took for granted weren’t easy for me.
We were all sure we were going places. That the world was our oyster. That we would leave our small town of Auburn far behind and make our mark on the world.
When we were together, we didn’t compete much because there was a clear hierarchy. Eric was the oldest and the smartest, and I was next in line to run the newspaper.
Rob and I never tried to argue Eric out of his Mormon faith while two evangelical girls on the staff tried and failed.
Rob and Eric carried their religion lightly. They didn’t proselytize. And they didn’t compromise their standards.
From day to day, I didn’t know who I was. Running in circles, I was constantly embracing new enthusiasms. I feared I was quite unstable compared to my grounded colleagues.
As I got older, I realized that other people prefer that one be predictable so they don’t have to think hard.
Schulzke’s scholarship grows out of American political development and the theory of executive power. His doctoral research and later articles examine Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) and the idea of crisis leadership. In Wilson’s writing on the presidency, crisis offers a way past institutional gridlock. Schulzke reads this against Wilson’s vision of the organic state, a polity held together by a deep and almost mystical popular unity that emergency brings to the surface. The reading places him among scholars who treat the early twentieth-century progressives as architects of the modern presidency. His other work reaches into federalism and the structure of American government, subjects that ask how power divides across levels and branches and how that division shapes self-rule.
Schulzke carried this scholarship into the classroom. He taught political science at Brigham Young University and worked within BYU Broadcasting in Provo, Utah. Student accounts describe a demanding teacher who prized mastery of concepts over memorization and who welcomed political argument. The setting suited a scholar of American institutions who also held strong views about public life. His later career kept this double character of the analyst who does not stand apart from the questions he studies.
Around 2013 he turned toward journalism. He covered national politics and policy for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City from 2013 to 2017. The beat let him write across a wide field. He covered faith in American public life, the treatment of college students with mental illness, prison education, parenting and shared domestic labor, and the moral questions raised by new technology. His range marks him as a writer drawn to subjects where policy meets conscience. One of his pieces opened with a warning to readers about a court case touching what he called America’s darkest industry, a sign of his willingness to take on hard moral material rather than soften it. After leaving the Deseret News staff he continued to publish, with bylines in Deseret Magazine, at KBYU, and in outlets such as Yahoo, U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Times, and New Atlas. The journalism reflects the same cast of mind as the scholarship. He thinks about institutions and the people inside them.
The third strand of his career, and the most personal, is The Apollo 13 Project. Schulzke founded and directs this nonprofit reentry initiative, based at Utah Valley University and presented online as Youturn.org. The project takes its name from NASA’s 1970 lunar mission, the near-disaster recounted in the 1995 Ron Howard (b. 1954) film Apollo 13. Schulzke draws a lesson from that story. When the odds looked hopeless, a ground crew worked without rest to bring the astronauts home. He wants the same kind of ground support for men and women leaving prison.
The project rests on a clear reading of the reentry problem. The hardest barriers a former prisoner faces are not always legal. Many are cultural and organizational. Employers fear liability, workplace safety risks, and damage to reputation, so qualified people meet a wall long after they finish their sentences. Schulzke answers this less through new legislation than through a change in public attitude. He aims to lower the perceived risk of a second-chance hire, to build relationships between employers and the formerly incarcerated, and to show the gains that follow successful reintegration. He places special weight on the stories of prisoners themselves, told through blogs and short video, on the theory that a human face changes public feeling more than argument does. He grounds the appeal in religious language as well, calling the New Testament a reentry manual at its core. The project drew an advisory board that included the sociologist Miriam Boeri of Kennesaw State University, whose interest in alternatives to incarceration had personal roots. Alongside the project Schulzke has worked on a book about incarceration policy.
A single intellectual signature runs through these three pursuits. Schulzke studies institutions and the moral life that goes on inside them. As a scholar he asks how crisis and structure shape the use of power. As a journalist he asks how faith, family, and policy press on ordinary lives. As a reformer he asks how a community changes its mind about people it has written off. The thread joining them is a conviction that public attitudes, not only laws, decide outcomes, and that careful persuasion can move those attitudes. He treats reform as a problem of culture and belief first and statute second.
The public record on Schulzke remains thin for a man of such varied output. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah, in the corridor between Provo and Salt Lake City that has shaped much of his work. Given his formidable rhetorical skills, he likely could be as famous as he wants, but instead he has chosen a career that has unfolded outside the national prominence that generates detailed biography. This obscurity fits the pattern of his work. He has spent his energy on the study of American government, on reporting that asks moral questions, and on a charity built for people the public prefers not to see. The value of his career lies in that consistency of purpose.
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Rob Stutzman belongs to a generation of California political strategists whose work spans the move from late twentieth-century campaign politics to the modern public affairs industry. For more than three decades he has worked as a campaign consultant, a government communications official, a media strategist, a corporate adviser, and a commentator. His path tracks larger changes in American political life. Consulting once turned on elections. It grew into a permanent trade that shapes public opinion, corporate reputation, regulatory fights, litigation, ballot measures, and the conduct of government. People know Stutzman first for his part in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise and then for his Sacramento consulting career. His wider importance sits at the crossing of politics, media, government, and corporate advocacy during a long realignment of the state.
A third-generation Californian, Stutzman was born in 1968 and raised in the state. He graduated from Placer High School in Auburn in 1986 and then took a degree in philosophy from Point Loma Nazarene University in 1990. Many consultants come out of campaign organizations, newsrooms, or law schools. Stutzman came out of philosophy, and the training served him. Philosophy teaches argument, persuasion, logic, and the weighing of rival claims. Those skills carry into a trade built on narrative, strategic communication, and the management of public perception.
He entered high-level California politics through Dan Lungren (b. 1946), a leading state Republican of the 1990s. Lungren served as California Attorney General from 1991 to 1999, and he embodied the law-and-order conservatism that ran through much of the state party in those years. Work inside the Attorney General’s office taught Stutzman the practical grammar of government communications. He learned how public institutions defend themselves under scrutiny, how legal controversy turns into public narrative, and how messaging meets law, regulation, and policy.
The Lungren years gave him a working education in difficult subjects: criminal justice, consumer protection, litigation, and public accountability. That education later shaped his crisis work and his public affairs practice. The job also placed him inside a network of Republican operatives, elected officials, advocates, and communications professionals who formed the institutional wing of California conservatism in the closing decade of the century.
After Lungren’s failed run for governor in 1998, Stutzman kept building his name within the state party. By the early 2000s he had established himself as a communications specialist who could work in both campaign and government settings. His defining chance arrived in one of the strangest episodes in modern state politics, the 2003 recall election against Governor Gray Davis (b. 1942).
The recall pulled together political anger, economic fear, celebrity, and media spectacle. Schwarzenegger entered the race with universal name recognition and no record in office. The campaign faced a reputational problem as large as the electoral one. It had to turn a movie star into a plausible governor.
As co-communications director, Stutzman became a principal architect of that turn. The task ran beyond the ordinary. A typical gubernatorial campaign deals with political reporters, editorial boards, and policy analysts. The Schwarzenegger campaign drew all of those and then drew entertainment reporters, celebrity outlets, foreign correspondents, photographers, and the tabloid press. The communications team had to move through two separate media worlds at once.
The hardest moment came in the final days, when the Los Angeles Times published accounts from several women about Schwarzenegger’s past conduct. The story threatened to sink the campaign at its weakest point. Stutzman and the rest of the communications team went into rapid response. Rather than let the accounts swallow the race, they pushed attention back toward the grievances that had fueled the recall: the budget crisis, the energy mess, and broad anger at the Davis administration. The effort did not erase the controversy. It kept the controversy from drowning the campaign’s core story, and it held Schwarzenegger’s outsider appeal through election day.
Victory carried Stutzman from campaign strategist to senior official. He went into the governor’s office and rose to deputy chief of staff for communications. From that post he ran one of the most visible communications operations in American state government, though the work differed from the same job under a conventional governor. Schwarzenegger stayed a global celebrity through his whole tenure. Every policy launch drew the kind of scrutiny that usually attaches to a president. The office had to coordinate press relations, speechwriting, public appearances, crisis management, and message design while it balanced competing pictures of the man: Republican reformer, environmental moderate, fiscal conservative, bipartisan dealmaker, and international star.
The administration also exposed strains inside the state party. By the middle of the decade, demographic and political change had made statewide Republican wins harder to find. Schwarzenegger answered by moving toward the center, a shift that sharpened after several ballot measures failed in the 2005 special election. Observers at the time often read Stutzman as a voice of the older Republican wing, which produced occasional friction between movement conservatives and the architects of the centrist turn.
He left the administration in 2005 and entered a phase of his career that reflected a wider shift in the trade. Experienced operatives kept leaving government to start public affairs firms that served corporations, trade associations, advocacy groups, and nonprofits. The line between campaign consulting and public affairs blurred. Organizations outside politics borrowed campaign methods to move public opinion and public policy.
Stutzman built a consulting practice in this period and came to be associated with Navigators Global, a prominent bipartisan public affairs firm with work in Sacramento and Washington. The bipartisan setting marked a change in his outlook. California’s political ground kept shifting. Democratic control deepened. Corporate clients could no longer lean on Republican relationships alone to advance their interests.
The bipartisan work sharpened his reading of public affairs as a post-partisan craft. Success came to depend on knowledge of government institutions more than on winning partisan fights. Clients needed advisers who could move through regulatory agencies, legislative committees, opinion campaigns, media controversies, and stakeholder coalitions whatever party held power. That reading sits at the center of his later philosophy. His clients ranged across technology, health care, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, aerospace, entertainment, consumer products, and nonprofit advocacy. Their common problem had little to do with elections. It had to do with institutional navigation. Public affairs came to resemble a permanent campaign run outside the election calendar.
His campaign skills stayed in demand even so. He served as a senior adviser and communications strategist for Meg Whitman (b. 1956)‘s 2010 run for governor, among the most expensive self-funded campaigns in American history. He worked as a senior California adviser to Mitt Romney (b. 1947)‘s presidential efforts. Both engagements showed his continued standing in establishment Republican politics, even as the state turned harder against statewide Republican candidates.
A defining trait of his career has been a willingness to criticize his own party in public. That trait grew sharper with the rise of Donald Trump (b. 1946). Many Republican consultants made their peace with Trump’s movement. Stutzman became one of California’s most prominent anti-Trump strategists. His opposition ran deeper than dislike of a candidate. It marked a clash between two ideas of conservatism. Institutions, governance, coalition-building, business interests, and traditional campaign politics had shaped his political identity. Trump’s populism challenged those premises.
The stance carried professional risk. State Republican politics grew more polarized along national lines. Stutzman stayed tied to a center-right faction that prized institutional stability, pragmatic governance, and broad coalitions. His case shows the bind of the establishment strategist in a party redefined by anti-establishment energy.
His career also shows a talent for adaptation. He did not retreat from politics. He widened his reach through public affairs, media commentary, and analysis. His expertise held value because the state’s political system still needed interpreters who could explain its peculiar institutions and its elections.
His tie to the California Target Book offers the clearest example of that institutional standing. The publication serves as a central reference in state politics. Campaigns, journalists, consultants, lobbyists, advocacy groups, and donors lean on its analysis of legislative and congressional districts, voter registration trends, election results, demographic change, and campaign finance. Its value runs past the data. It forms part of the informational backbone of California politics. Stewardship of such a work places its editors and owners near the center of the state’s political intelligence network. Through that role Stutzman became a curator of the information other actors depend on, not merely a player among them.
His influence widened again through commentary. Over the past decade he has become a frequent analyst on television, radio, podcasts, and public panels. His appearances often pair him with Democratic strategists such as Garry South, a sign of analysis grounded in institutional knowledge rather than partisan pleading. The conversations turn on the machinery of state politics: the top-two primary, the independent redistricting commission, demographic change, campaign finance, and electoral realignment. The bipartisan cast of these appearances reflects a larger truth. As one-party control grew, sound analysis came to require knowledge of the state’s institutions more than defense of a party line. Stutzman became a leading interpreter of that world.
The most revealing chapter of his later years may be his friendship with Democratic Congressman Ami Bera (b. 1965). The two men spent years on opposite sides of House campaigns before they built a personal bond rooted in mutual respect and shared worry about polarization. Their friendship stands for an older political culture, one where rivals could compete without treating each other as enemies.
Seen across its whole length, Stutzman’s career traces several large shifts in American politics. He began in an era of traditional campaign communications. He rose through government in the age of celebrity politics. He adjusted to the spread of permanent public affairs campaigns. He watched Republican competitiveness collapse in California. He moved through the rise of polarization and populist insurgency. And he helped build the consulting industry that now mediates among government, corporations, media, advocacy groups, and the public.
His larger significance rests in none of these alone, in no single campaign, client, or scandal. He stands as a representative figure in the rise of California’s professional political class. His career opens a window onto how influence operates in modern politics, through communications, coalition-building, institutional knowledge, strategic messaging, and the management of public narrative. In that sense his life doubles as a history of political consulting, the trade’s passage from an occasional electoral business into a permanent feature of governance, advocacy, and public life.
David Pinsof, with David Sears and Martie Haselton, argues that political belief systems carry no deep moral thread. Beliefs track alliances. People choose allies by similarity, by transitivity, and by interdependence, then they defend those allies with a standard kit of biases that Pinsof calls propagandistic: they downplay an ally’s transgressions, embellish an ally’s grievances, and credit an ally’s advantages to merit while blaming an ally’s setbacks on circumstance. Values come second. They get confabulated to dress the alliance in moral clothing. Applied to a political consultant, the theory turns almost recursive. Pinsof treats these tactics as evolved equipment that fires in every one of us for free. Stutzman sells them by the hour.
Start with the anti-Trump break, since it anchors his public identity. Stutzman casts the stance as principle: institutions, governance, coalition-building, the older Republican craft. Alliance Theory reads the same stance as a signal of allegiance. His career bound him to a coalition of business elites, governance Republicans, and the consultant class that serves them. Trump’s movement drew its strength from a rival bloc, the rural and working-class White voters Pinsof groups under the losers of globalization. When that bloc captured the party, Stutzman’s coalition lost the house it had built. His institutionalism reads as the belief-content that allegiance generates, not the premise that produced the allegiance. Pinsof’s claim about elites does the work here. He holds that elites are no more coherent than ordinary voters, only better tuned to the alliances around them. A consultant is the limiting case of that claim. Stutzman reads the alliance map for a living, so he tracks the lines of loyalty with a precision the average partisan never reaches.
His bipartisan turn shows transitivity at work, and transitivity is the sharpest tool the theory hands you for this subject. Pinsof’s rule runs simple: the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend, and the ally of my ally becomes my friend. His Putin example runs one direction. Trump praised Putin, and Republican warmth toward Putin tripled, because a leader’s friend slides into the coalition behind him. Stutzman’s case runs the other direction. The populist capture of his party converted his former rivals into usable partners. Establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans share a common enemy in the anti-institutional insurgency, so they drift toward each other. His panels alongside the Democratic strategist Garry South stage that drift in public. Two men who spent careers on opposite sides now read the state’s politics from the same institutional priors, against the same disruptive force. Chapais, whom Pinsof cites, gives the name for this: a bridging alliance, where high-ranking actors from across an old divide combine to hold their rank against a revolutionary challenge from below. Stutzman’s center-right and the establishment center-left form that bridge. Trump’s coalition forms the revolution.
The theory also dissolves the puzzle of his post-partisan consulting philosophy. Stutzman describes public affairs as a craft that floats above party, a practice tuned to institutions rather than to red and blue. Pinsof would not read this as a conversion to neutrality. He would read it as relocation inside a shifted alliance structure. California’s Republican collapse changed the map. The old link between party and corporate interest frayed, and a consultant who wanted to keep serving corporate clients had to learn the new lines. Pinsof stresses that alliance structures are contingent and partly stochastic, that small shifts snowball into arrangements with no deeper logic than the cliques of a high school. Stutzman lived through one such snowball, the long realignment that turned the state one-party. His philosophy names the new terrain. It does not rise above terrain as such.
His tie to the California Target Book. Pinsof builds his argument on two figures, maps of the American alliance structure that show which groups read as liberal and which read as conservative. He notes that liberals and conservatives agree about who sits on which side at a correlation of .97. People hold common knowledge of the structure, and that common knowledge lets the whole system run. The Target Book is that map made explicit and sold to the people who need it. Districts, registration, group allegiance, the shape of every local conflict. Stutzman as steward of the Target Book is custodian of the society’s alliance map, the keeper of the common knowledge Pinsof treats as the substrate of political life.
Crisis communications, in Pinsof’s vocabulary, is the manufacture of perpetrator biases on commission. Downplay the client’s responsibility, raise the mitigating circumstances, embellish the good intentions, shrink the harm. The recall campaign’s final week shows the pattern in full. The Los Angeles Times ran accounts of Schwarzenegger’s past conduct, and Stutzman’s team moved the story off the conduct and back onto the budget, the energy crisis, and the grievance against Davis. Pinsof describes that move as a species-typical reflex. Stutzman ran it as paid technique under deadline. Public affairs extends the same craft to corporate clients: victim biases when a client claims unfair treatment by regulators, attributional biases when a client credits its success to merit and its troubles to a hostile environment. The consultant is a merchant of the very tactics the theory says evolution gives away.
His friendship with the Democratic Congressman Ami Bera offers the one place where the frame turns gentle. Pinsof ends by proposing that political alliances are friendships, that parties are cliques, that the two sides of an ideological dispute resemble the two sides of a falling-out between friends. Distrust your friend’s version of events and he stops counting you as a friend. Distrust your fellow partisan’s version and he stops counting you as an ally. Stutzman and Bera spent years on opposite sides of House campaigns, then built a bond across the divide. Read through Pinsof, their friendship is a personal alliance that cuts against the partisan super-alliances, a small surviving piece of the cross-cutting structure that prevailed before the two coalitions hardened. They trust each other’s story even while their coalitions refuse to trust each other’s.
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Catherine Seipp (1957-2007) watched American media change from inside a city the rest of the press treated as a backwater. She held no large platform. She edited no major paper, hosted no national broadcast, owned no media company. She worked as a freelancer, a columnist, a critic, and, late in her short life, a blogger. From that modest perch she became a hub for a loose network of journalists, lawyers, academics, and commentators who built much of the early intellectual furniture of the online public sphere.
Her importance rests less on any single piece than on a habit of mind. She read institutions the way a sociologist reads them, as arrangements of incentives that shape the people inside them. She saw authority leaving large organizations and gathering instead around individuals linked by conversation and reputation. She analyzed that shift. She also helped cause it.
She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on November 17, 1957. Her family moved to Los Alamitos, in Orange County, when she was small. She enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles at sixteen and took a degree in English. Her first jobs ran through the trade and daily press: a stint at the Associated Press, work at the fashion trade paper California Apparel News, then four years as a fashion writer at the Daily News in the early 1980s.
Southern California formed her more than any newsroom did. Los Angeles lacked the thick hierarchy of New York journalism. It had fewer prestige outlets, weaker gatekeepers, and a looser market for writers who moved among newspapers, magazines, television, public relations, and the studios. The place rewarded improvisation. It bred a writer skeptical of official accounts and curious about the social machinery that produced them.
Seipp first drew real attention at Buzz, the Los Angeles magazine that set itself against the Los Angeles Times and the city’s media establishment. For five years through the 1990s she wrote a column under the name Margo Magee. She chronicled the inner life of the Times: its newsroom quarrels, its editorial fashions, the gap between what the paper said about itself and what it did. Her targets were rarely abstractions. She named editors, named stories, traced incentives, followed decisions. Colleagues called her malicious and unfair, and some called her worse. The anger told her she had hit something.
The Staples Center episode of 1999 gave her critique its sharpest case. The Los Angeles Times published a special magazine on the new arena and, without telling its readers, agreed to split the advertising revenue with the arena it covered. When the arrangement surfaced, it became a national argument about journalistic ethics. Seipp saw past the single lapse to the strain underneath it. A modern paper sells itself as a neutral arbiter of public life while it leans more and more on commercial partnerships. The Staples affair exposed that strain, and she returned to it for years.
Her journalism read more like sociology than like political commentary. She treated newspapers, universities, charities, advocacy groups, and studios as systems that produce predictable behavior. She asked who gains, what incentives operate, which pressures stay hidden, what reputation buys. That cast of mind set her apart from the ideological writers of her time. She cared little for theory and a great deal for organizations and the people who staff them. Her work anticipated later talk of elite signaling and status competition, though she got there by watching rather than by building models.
Her largest influence ran through people rather than print. Friends gave her Los Angeles salon a half-joking name, the mackerocracy, after the dinners she hosted. Writers, bloggers, lawyers, radio hosts, and academics came to trade information, argument, gossip, and professional intelligence. Hugh Hewitt (b. 1956) and Mickey Kaus (b. 1951) passed through, along with the law professor Stephen Bainbridge, the writer Ken Layne, and others who would soon make their names online. The same circle gathered after her death to mourn her in print, among them Matt Welch, Amy Alkon, Kate Coe, and Sandra Tsing Loh (b. 1962). These dinners worked as a physical rehearsal for the networked communities that blogs, podcasts, and newsletters later built in software. Before the social web existed, Seipp ran one at her table. She introduced strangers, moved information, and made a small reputational market. She connected a reporter to an academic, a blogger to a lawyer.
She grasped blogging early, when most editors still waved it off as a hobby for cranks. Her own blog, Cathy’s World, gathered readers around politics, media, and Los Angeles life, and she answered them in her own voice. The blog carried a larger argument inside it. Information no longer ran one way, from institutions down to an audience. A single writer could publish, gather readers, and join conversations that once stayed locked inside professional walls. She likened the established press’s contempt for blogging to the last moans of a dying brontosaurus. Podcasts, Substack newsletters, independent commentary, the whole personality-driven press that followed all grew from the shift she named before her profession admitted it.
Her national readership came through From the Left Coast, the weekly column she wrote for National Review Online, and through a monthly column for the Independent Women’s Forum. Reviewers filed her under conservative, and the label never fit well. She wrote less about doctrine than about manners. She used Southern California as a field site for reading the country: Hollywood, schools, celebrity, philanthropy, city hall, the slow drift of social norms. Elite hypocrisy drew her eye. She tracked Arianna Huffington (b. 1950) from conservative socialite to progressive media entrepreneur and read the change less as conviction than as a study in how an elite identity bends to its surroundings. Her Hollywood pieces dwelt on the galas and the fundraisers and the celebrity causes rather than the films, because the social world around the movies showed the workings of status and influence.
She insisted that Los Angeles deserved study on its own terms. The Eastern press treated the city as an entertainment colony or a lesser New York. She rejected the frame. Her Los Angeles had its own institutions, its own power centers, its own rankings of prestige: studios, school boards, papers, real estate money, the foundations. Her columns often read as field notes on that ecology. She mapped how influence moved among stars, reporters, politicians, donors, and nonprofits, well before network analysis became a fashion.
In 2002 doctors found lung cancer in her, though she had never smoked. She turned the disease into one more subject for criticism. She refused the sentimental script. She mistrusted the therapeutic culture around illness, the awareness campaigns sold like products, the demand that a patient narrate her sickness as a journey toward moral growth. She faulted the cancer-awareness industry for its compulsory optimism, which she said failed the people it claimed to serve. Her essays from those years hold up as some of the sharpest illness writing of their moment because they refuse both pity and uplift. She kept her post to the end: observer, critic, skeptic of institutions.
Her writing joined a reporter’s eye for detail, a columnist’s wit, and a sociologist’s patience with institutions. She distrusted grand theory and preferred to pile up examples. A newspaper scandal. A celebrity benefit. A campus fight. A media campaign. A political conversion. Set side by side, the cases showed patterns. She handled them with humor rather than zeal, which left her hard to file. She belonged to no camp. Her loyalty ran to observation.
She married Jerry Lazar in 1986. Their daughter, Maia, arrived in 1989. The marriage ended in divorce in 1990, and she did not marry again. She wanted to see Maia off to college, and she nearly made it. Catherine Seipp died at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles on March 21, 2007, at forty-nine.
She died as the forces she had charted picked up speed. The social web was about to remake journalism. Blogs were moving to the center of political talk. Institutional authority kept fragmenting, and independent writers kept challenging the old gatekeepers. Seen from here, she looks less like a late figure of the print era than an early figure of the next one. She read the decentralization of authority before most reporters saw it. She prized networks before network theory arrived. She treated institutions as systems of incentives while that habit still looked eccentric.
Her lasting mark lies in what she wrote and in what she built. She bridged the metropolitan newsroom and the blog, the hierarchy of the twentieth century and the looser circuits of the twenty-first. Few writers show the change in American public talk across the first internet decade as clearly as she does. She did not only witness it. She helped make it.
Catherine Seipp held no title and ran no institution, yet she stood at the center of the network that built the early intellectual architecture of the blogosphere. Accounts that start from her writing miss the source of that standing. Randall Collins gives a better one. Read through interaction ritual chains, her authority came from a recurring ritual she hosted, and the theory names the parts.
Collins, in Interaction Ritual Chains, builds his account from four ingredients. People assemble in bodily co-presence. A barrier marks who belongs and who stays outside. The group fixes its attention on a shared object or activity. And the members come to share a mood. When these combine, they feed one another. Mutual focus sharpens the common mood, the common mood deepens the focus, and the talk and laughter fall into rhythm. Collins calls this entrainment. A gathering that reaches it stops feeling like a set of separate people and starts feeling like one body.
The mackerocracy dinners satisfy every ingredient. The guests came in person, around a table, night after night over years. Invitation drew the line between the circle and the rest of the Los Angeles trade. The talk fixed on a shared object, the press and its sins, the targets, the gossip, the inside knowledge of how the city’s newsrooms ran. And the mood was shared and strong: the pleasure of insider talk, the wit, the common contempt for the establishment the guests had gathered to dissect. The dinners were not occasions for the ritual. They were the ritual.
Collins names what a successful ritual produces. It makes solidarity, a felt membership in the group. It charges each member with emotional energy, the confidence and drive that send a person back into the world ready to act. It mints symbols, the emblems and words and shared references that members come to treat as sacred and feel bound to defend. And it sets a moral standard, so that an attack on the symbols draws righteous anger. Seipp’s salon produced all four. The name mackerocracy is the membership emblem, a private word that marks the holder as one of the circle. The Los Angeles Times and its managerial reformers served as the negative sacred object, the thing the group defined itself against. Reputations circulated as the currency of the table. And the fury her column drew from other journalists is the moral standard at work from the far side: she had violated their symbols, and they defended them by calling her malicious.
Here Collins explains the line you wrote, that her power came from the table rather than from a title. Emotional energy in his account is not evenly shared. It stratifies. Some people leave an encounter charged and some leave drained, and the ones who reliably raise the charge in others accumulate it. They become what Collins calls energy stars. Their pull is charisma, and charisma in this account is not a trait carried into the room. It is an effect produced by the room, renewed each time the ritual succeeds. The host of a recurring high-charge gathering sits at the focus of attention and at the source of the invitations. She gathers the most energy and holds the gate. Seipp’s standing was charismatic in Collins’s strict sense, manufactured and recharged at every dinner, which is why it needed no masthead behind it.
The chains are the second half of the theory, and they explain her reach. People do not stay at one table. They carry their charge and their symbols from situation to situation, and each new encounter is a small market where they spend what they have and seek a better return. A guest left Seipp’s dinner charged and carried that energy into a column, a broadcast, a blog post, another room. The network spread because its members were moving outward all week, lit by the same source. Seipp’s introductions did more. When she put a reporter next to an academic, or a blogger next to a lawyer, she spliced two chains that had run apart. In The Sociology of Philosophies Collins argues that creativity and influence concentrate in face-to-face networks, in the chains of personal contact that link masters to pupils and rivals to rivals. The hub of such a network shapes far more than its own output. Seipp occupied that hub. A woman with no platform helped set the terms of a coming media world because she sat where the chains crossed.
The blog complicates the picture. Collins is skeptical that interaction at a distance carries the charge of bodily co-presence. Bodies in a room entrain. Readers at screens do not, or do so faintly. So the blog and the column read best as distribution rather than as source. The charge began at the table and the text carried it out. Seipp saw the power of blogging before most of her trade, and she ran her own blog with skill, but the theory suggests the live gathering still did the generating. Her case sits on the hinge between a press built on co-present ritual and a press built on mediated networks, and it shows what the new arrangement gained in reach and risked in heat.
The cancer years. An awareness campaign is a ritual too, with its assembled crowd, its barrier of the initiated, its fixed object, and its prescribed mood of compulsory optimism. Seipp refused it, and Collins explains the refusal. A ritual can be forced, and a forced ritual produces performance rather than charge. The patient is handed a script and told to feel a feeling on cue. The emotional energy never arrives, only the show of it. Seipp had spent a career watching real assemblies make real heat, so she recognized the hollow ones, and she would not perform.
Collins also predicts the aftermath. Symbols decay when the rituals that charge them stop. A sacred object left without renewal fades into a dead word. When Seipp died, the dinners ended, and the theory expects the charge to drain and the emblems to dim. The crowd of blogs that gathered to mourn her is itself a last ritual, a final assembly around the symbol of her name, a recharge before the slow fade. The network outlived her for a while on banked energy and shared memory. But without the table to renew them, Collins holds, even the strongest symbols cool. Her authority lived in a ritual, and a ritual lives only as long as it meets.
The Observer’s Allies: Catherine Seipp Through Alliance Theory
Alliance Theory makes a blunt claim. Political belief systems do not flow from abstract values like equality or authority. They flow from whom a person treats as an ally and whom as a rival. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton build the account on two assumptions: people carry a psychology for choosing and detecting allies, and people use propagandistic tactics to defend those allies and attack their rivals. The tactics have shapes the paper names: perpetrator biases that excuse an ally’s wrongs, victim biases that magnify an ally’s grievances, attributional biases that credit an ally’s gains to virtue and blame an ally’s losses on circumstance. Read this way, a belief system is not a philosophy. It is a patchwork of justifications assembled to serve a coalition. Applied to Catherine Seipp, the frame explains her subjects, explains her position, and then turns back on her in a way she might have disliked.
The choosing runs on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, with a large measure of accident. People ally with those like themselves, with those who share their rivals, and with those who supply them benefits, and each pull feeds the next until coalitions harden into clusters with shared loyalties and shared enemies. The paper insists the tactics are symmetrical. Left and right run the same plays on different targets. Elites are no more consistent than the masses; they are only better tuned to the contingent alliances of their society. Keep that symmetry in view, because it is where the frame eventually catches Seipp.
Start with her subjects. Seipp treated the press as a trade with interests, not as a neutral window on the world. Alliance Theory supplies the seam she worked. The paper describes a split that opened in the late twentieth century between intellectual elites, the knowledge workers like journalists and academics, and business elites, the corporate owners and executives. Seipp’s beat sat on that fault. She covered the Los Angeles Times as its reporters fought its corporate managers, and she read journalists as a status class with allegiances of their own. Alliance Theory predicts that such a class will cover the world to favor its allies and bruise its rivals, and that its members will call the result objectivity. Seipp spent a career cataloguing the favoritism case by case. She lacked the paper’s vocabulary. She tracked the thing the vocabulary names.
The Staples Center scandal. The paper sold a special section on the arena while it split the revenue with the arena, then presented itself to readers as an impartial judge of the city. Alliance Theory treats the profession’s claim to neutrality as the same kind of moral self-description it finds on every side of every conflict, a flag run up to draw third parties rather than a report on reality. The outrage that followed, and the newsroom’s defense of its threatened honor, look like coalition behavior. Seipp saw a structural strain under a single lapse. The frame sharpens her reading into a claim: the press defends its standing the way any alliance defends a sacred symbol.
Seipp followed Huffington from conservative socialite to progressive media entrepreneur and read the change as identity bending to its surroundings rather than as conviction. That is Alliance Theory in plain speech. The paper argues that allegiance comes first and values follow, citing longitudinal evidence that prior party identification predicts later moral commitments and not the reverse. Huffington swapped one coalition for another, and her beliefs realigned to fit her new allies. Seipp intuited the order of operations the data later confirmed.
Hollywood drew the same eye, and the frame rewards it. Seipp wrote less about films than about the galas, the fundraisers, and the celebrity causes, because the social world around the movies showed her how status got displayed and traded. Alliance Theory treats moral and egalitarian rhetoric as a tactic for mobilizing support around allied groups, not as a principle held across the board. The paper offers a clean example: voters call a corporate executive’s millions unfair and a movie star’s millions fine, or the reverse, depending on which earner their coalition claims. Seipp circled that double standard for years. The frame names the engine she watched running.
Her network fits the choosing rules. The mackerocracy formed by similarity, a circle of media skeptics who thought alike about the trade. It cohered through transitivity, the shared rivalry against the establishment press that made any enemy of the Times a friend of the table. It held together through interdependence, the steady trade of information, introductions, and reputation. When Seipp put a reporter next to an academic or a blogger next to a lawyer, she raised the transitivity of the whole cluster, knitting separate loyalties into one coalition. Alliance Theory would call her salon a small super-alliance of contrarians, built by the same rules that build any faction.
Then there is Seipp. Reviewers filed her as conservative, and the label never sat right, which puzzled people who expected beliefs to track a creed. Alliance Theory dissolves the puzzle. Ideology is whom you stand with, and Seipp’s rivalries did not line up with the Republican coalition. She warred with the progressive media class and the therapeutic establishment, which placed her near the right on those fights. She showed little interest in the rest of the conservative program. By the paper’s account she is a strange bedfellow in the literal sense, a person whose heterogeneous allies and rivals produce a belief profile that looks incoherent only to someone expecting a philosophy. She is the paper’s thesis walking around Los Angeles. Alliance Theory holds that everyone runs propagandistic biases, the bias-hunter included. Seipp made her name catching her rivals applying perpetrator and victim biases, excusing their allies and embellishing their favored groups’ grievances. The frame asks the question she could not have asked of herself with the same edge: did she catch her own side’s propaganda as keenly? An analyst who exposes the liberal media class while standing inside an anti-establishment coalition has every reason, by this account, to magnify her rivals’ double standards and to wave through her allies’. Her cherished stance, loyalty to observation alone, is the impartiality claim the paper treats with most suspicion, because it is the claim every coalition makes. The frame does not call her a fraud. It argues that her detachment was a position in the fight, and that her motivated reading of her rivals was, in the paper’s terms, an honest signal of loyalty to her allies. She was a sharp observer and a skilled partisan, and Alliance Theory says the second description does not cancel the first.
The frame strains in one place. Her cancer writing, her refusal of the awareness industry and its compulsory optimism, does not reduce to political alliance.
Cultural Capital Without a Masthead: Catherine Seipp Through Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treats any social world as a field, a structured space of struggle with its own stakes, its own rules, and its own forms of capital. The journalistic field is one such space, and in his account it is weakly autonomous, pulled between two poles. At one end stands peer recognition, the judgment of other journalists by professional standards. At the other end stands the market, the pull of circulation, ratings, and advertising. The history he tells in On Television is the history of the second pole growing strong enough to bend the first. Read through this frame, Catherine Seipp’s beat, her standing, and her unclassifiable politics all come into focus, and her cherished pose comes into question.
Her media criticism is a running report from the bend. When she chronicled the Los Angeles Times, she watched the commercial pole gain on the professional one. The traditional reporters answered to peer standards and to the craft. The corporate managers answered to circulation and the balance sheet. Bourdieu names that contest. The more a field’s rewards flow from the market, the more its internal standards give way, and the people who hold those standards lose ground to the people who hold the money. Seipp catalogued the surrender case by case across two decades. She lacked his vocabulary. She tracked the process the vocabulary describes.
The Staples Center scandal is heteronomy made visible. The paper sold a special section on the arena and split the revenue with the subject it covered. The commercial logic walked through the front door of the space that claimed to serve the public without a price. Bourdieu argues that a weakly autonomous field cannot hold the line once its commercial pole grows dominant, and the Staples affair is that failure caught in the open. Seipp read a structural strain beneath a single lapse. Bourdieu supplies the structure: a field whose market end had grown strong enough to override its professional end, then to dress the override as ordinary business.
The seam she worked her whole life is what Bourdieu calls the field of power, and the actors on it carry different capital. Journalists and academics hold cultural capital, the education and craft and taste that confer standing, but they hold less economic capital than the owners and executives above them. Bourdieu calls them the dominated fraction of the dominant class. They sit near the top of society and near the bottom of their own institutions. The Los Angeles Times reporters against the corporate managers are that arrangement in miniature, holders of cultural capital subordinate to holders of economic capital inside one building. Seipp’s beat traced that fault. Her interest in who holds prestige and who confers it, the status signaling she returned to again and again, is the traffic of cultural and symbolic capital watched up close.
Her salon converted that interest into power, and Bourdieu explains how a person with no title and little money came to hold it. Social capital is the resources a person draws from a durable network of relationships. The mackerocracy turned a series of dinners into such a network, and Seipp sat at its center, the node who could grant access, move information, and supply introductions. Over time the social capital hardened into symbolic capital, the prestige that let her judgment raise or bruise a reputation. A field has its instances of consecration, the actors who confer legitimacy and value, and Seipp became a small one. Her notice marked people. Her table admitted them. Bourdieu accounts for the puzzle that her career poses to anyone who expects power to come from a masthead: she amassed the forms of capital a field actually trades in, and she occupied a position from which she could consecrate.
Her trajectory shaped her stance, as Bourdieu says trajectories do. She came from the margins of the field, from Southern California rather than the consecrated Eastern houses, from the trade press and fashion pages and a column written under a borrowed name. Bourdieu holds that newcomers and the under-capitalized pursue subversion against the orthodox holders, because they have little stake in the established order and much to gain by upsetting it. Her insurgent posture follows from her location. Buzz against the Times, and later the blog against the legacy gatekeepers, are the heterodox moves of a player rich in cultural capital and poor in inherited position. Her contrarianism reads less as temperament than as a position-taking determined by where she stood.
The blog extends the same logic. Bourdieu shows a field policed by barriers to entry and by a near-monopoly on consecration held by its established houses. The web lowered the cost of entry and broke the monopoly, letting players build standing without an institution to credential them. Seipp grasped that the field was opening before her trade admitted it. Bourdieu might frame her foresight as a clear read of the field’s changing structure, a recognition that the houses were losing their grip on who counts as a journalist and whose judgment carries weight.
Her method is a strike against what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. The journalistic field imposes categories of perception, ways of seeing that the public and the covered fields accept as natural, and that imposition serves the field’s interests while passing as plain description. Seipp spent her career denaturalizing the press’s account of itself, exposing the interests behind the disinterested pose. Bourdieu names the move she kept making. She refused to let the field’s self-image stand as neutral fact and insisted on the position behind the report.
The frame also dissolves the puzzle of her politics. Reviewers filed her as conservative, and the label fit poorly, which confuses anyone who reads beliefs as a coherent creed. Bourdieu locates a person’s stances in field position rather than in a value system. Seipp stood as an under-capitalized insurgent against the consecrated press establishment, and that position produced a profile that looked conservative on some fights and unreadable on others. The field explains the shape of her opinions better than any ideology does.
Here the frame turns on her, and the turn is the honest part. Bourdieu insisted that the analyst occupies a position too, that critique is also a play for capital, and that the loudest claim to stand above the game is often the shrewdest move inside it. Seipp’s prized stance, loyalty to observation alone, is by his account a position-taking. The claim to disinterest is a bid for the prestige of the autonomous pole, the purest symbolic capital the field offers, the standing of the one who serves no master and reports without fear. Whether her detachment was real disinterest or a refined form of interest is the question Bourdieu’s reflexivity forces, and the frame leans toward the second answer without quite settling it. Her independence bought her authority. Authority is the prize. A player who renounces the smaller stakes to win the largest one is still playing.
The limits. Bourdieu built the apparatus for fields of cultural production, so it grips her professional life hard and loses traction on her cancer writing, where the categories of capital and consecration have little to seize. Force the awareness industry into a field if you must, but the fit frays. And his structuralism runs the risk of dissolving her into position-effects, explaining the journalist while losing the woman, the voice and the wit and the particular choices that made her worth reading. The frame tells you why a margin-born, under-capitalized insurgent took the positions she took. It tells you less about why she took them better than the others who shared her position. On her professional standing it outperforms the rivals. On her singularity it goes quiet, and you will want another lens for that.
What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed almost to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly low-stakes performance of tribal nationalism…
In theory, national teams should offer a different appeal, one that is less arbitrary. And a way for those who feel their countries have been drained of patriotism and national identity to enact their fantasy of replenishing those feelings. In the time of Marine Le Pen, you might expect French football fans to be especially animated about Les Bleus, for instance, rather than raging about criticism from the team’s Black star Kylian Mbappé. In Britain’s Reform era, you might expect a kind of national revival of the proud hooliganism of earlier, less globalized eras. You might see that hooliganism on the streets of Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, but when it comes to soccer London seems more worked up about Arsenal than about the Lions.
…what we identify as nationalism in global affairs might be better described as a form of parochialism, with populists making particular claims not about the nation per se so much as the ways it should be reformed — presumably toward some reactionary ideal, its contours often more local than genuinely national. In this reading, globalization hasn’t just generated a backlash among those who resent deindustrialization, capital flight and the stateless lives of the world’s billionaires. It has also made the nation itself seem like a somewhat untrustworthy unit of political and social organization to many people on the right. For them, what might once have served as a source of patriotism and pride now produces feelings of resentment and regret. Not that liberals aren’t queasy about nationalism these days, either. For all of us, rooting for Arsenal or P.S.G. might now be more appealing precisely because it’s essentially meaningless.
He’s describing something real. As of June 3, 2026, I feel no excitement about this World Cup, and I love the World Cup. I don’t know why I currently don’t feel anything.
My thoughts are jumbled.
I like his point about the turn from nationalism to parochialism. Wallace-Wells notices that the populist right does not trust the nation as it exists, because the nation’s team now looks like its diasporas, so the right retreats into a fantasy of a reformed nation that no eleven men on a field can represent. Mbappé and Le Pen carry the point for him. That observation cuts against the lazy assumption that political nationalism and soccer nationalism rise together.
Wallace-Wells is really writing about the collapse of national belonging as spectacle. The World Cup used to convert national identity into harmless collective theater. This no longer works because the nation has become contested terrain.
What we identify as nationalism in global affairs might be better described as a form of parochialism.
The World Cup depends on a shared fiction that “France,” “England,” “America,” or “Argentina” can still appear as one body. That fiction is harder to sustain when national identity has become internally litigated.
Club fandom is easier because it asks less of the fan. Arsenal does not require metaphysical agreement about nationhood. It offers style, stars, colors, weekly rituals, and low-cost belonging.
A Frenchman watched France because France felt partly constitutive of who he was. The national team represented an extension of the self. The victory belonged to him in some symbolic sense.
A buffered self approaches the nation differently. Nationhood becomes one affiliation among many. The person can be simultaneously an Arsenal fan, a software engineer, a vegan, a resident of London, a member of an online gaming community, and a citizen of Britain. No single identity necessarily dominates.
The contemporary right often calls for stronger national identities, but many of the social conditions that produced porous national identities have weakened. Religious participation is lower. Local communities are weaker. Geographic mobility is higher. Intermarriage is higher. Social life is more online. Consumer choice saturates everyday life. As a result, nationalism often becomes ideological rather than lived.
People talk about the nation constantly while feeling less embedded in national institutions and traditions.
If the right feels betrayed by the multiethnic national side, that explains alienation from Les Bleus or the Three Lions. It does not explain why club soccer fills the gap. Club teams are more multiethnic, more for-hire, more corporate, as he says himself. His two examples of club passion, the New York mayor and Dave Portnoy, are not aggrieved populists pining for blood and soil. They are men who picked a foreign team for no reason and enjoy it.
The empirical base is thin. Unsold tickets at punishing prices, canceled hotel blocks, a boycott aimed at Trump. He admits interest will surge once the games begin. None of that shows a worldwide decline in national-team feeling. A boycott of a US-hosted tournament is a host-country effect, not evidence about how Brazilians or Argentines or Englishmen feel.
The largest gap is the format. This is the first 48-team World Cup. More teams, more mismatches, more filler in the early rounds. That dilution explains pre-tournament apathy better than any theory about the nation, and it sits right in front of him. He writes “drained of meaning” and then reaches past the structural answer for cultural ones.
He says rooting for Arsenal appeals because it means nothing. But he spent the essay arguing club tribalism carries real feeling, and he cites Foer to call club loyalty a check on globalism. Both cannot stand. Either club fandom is empty and the World Cup’s fade is a loss, or club fandom is full and his frame about displaced nationalism needs rebuilding.
He reads the political weather well. The right quarrels with the nation as it is, not with the idea of nations.
The new club fandom Wallace-Wells describes is buffered. Portnoy picks Tottenham. The New York mayor picks Arsenal. Nothing in birth or blood hands him the team. The self selects it and assigns it whatever weight he likes. Wallace-Wells calls this arbitrary and treats the arbitrariness as a puzzle. Arbitrary intense attachment is the mark of the buffered self, which makes its own meaning and knows it made it.
Wallace-Wells asks why political nationalism rises while soccer nationalism does not. Charles Taylor might say that modern men are buffered, even the nationalists, and a buffered self cannot relate to his nation porously no matter how badly he wants to. The right-wing dream of national replenishment is the buffered self trying to will porousness back into existence. It fails by its own form. Enchantment you select is not enchantment. Belonging you design is not belonging.
Wallace-Wells says populists make claims about how the nation should be reformed rather than about the nation as it stands. A buffered self relates to the nation as a project, an object held in the mind and measured against an ideal. The porous self has no project. The nation inhabits him. So the program of reform gives away the buffered character of the men running it. They crave porous belonging and can produce only a buffered blueprint.
The Mbappé episode reads the same way. A porous nationalism takes whoever wears the shirt as the nation made flesh. Le Pen’s people judge the team against a template in the head and find Mbappé wanting. That judging stance, holding the real team at arm’s length against an interior ideal, is buffered to the core, even while it wears the costume of blood and soil.
He says club fandom appeals because it means nothing. The buffered self cheers hard and stays detached at once, because it knows the meaning is its own and could have landed elsewhere. Intensity and arbitrariness sit together with no strain.
FIFA’s corruption, host politics, ticket pricing, and corporate bloat are not side issues. They drain the sacramental quality from the event. A World Cup that feels like an extractive mega-event cannot easily serve as popular nationalism.
The modern buffered individual treats identity as a project of personal curation. Fandom is no longer a matter of geographic or tribal destiny; it is a choice. A fan in Los Angeles or Lagos can choose to support Arsenal or Paris Saint-Germain based on tactical aesthetics, a specific player, or a digital subculture.
Because the buffered self relies on autonomy, this choice feels authentic precisely because it is arbitrary. It carries no inherent moral duty or existential risk. If the club fails, or if its corporate ownership becomes unpalatable, the individual can detach or recalibrate his consumption. Club fandom satisfies the modern need for connection without compromising individual sovereignty. It is a controlled, low-stakes simulation of community.
International football operates on an older, porous logic. It demands that the individual surrender his curated identity to the accident of birth. You do not choose your national team; you inherit it.
During a World Cup, the boundaries of the buffered self temporarily dissolve. The individual is re-embedded into a collective body, vulnerable to a shared national fate that he cannot control. This porous experience requires a thick, underlying social consensus to function smoothly. The collective ritual only works if everyone agrees on what the national emblem represents.
The current friction surrounding the World Cup reflects the difficulty modern individuals face when trying to inhabit this porous state. When national teams become battlegrounds for domestic culture wars, the shared social matrix fractures. The individual can no longer easily slip into the collective identity because the definition of that identity is contested.
Wallace-Wells notes that rooting for a corporate club is appealing because it is essentially meaningless. In Taylor’s terms, club soccer is the ideal playground for the buffered self because it offers the thrill of tribalism without the weight of belonging.
The muted anticipation for the World Cup is not a sign that nationalism is dead, but rather that the porous demand of international sports is increasingly difficult to sustain in a hyper-individualistic, buffered age. When the tournament begins, the raw visceral pull of national alignment may still break through the buffer, forcing a temporary return to that older, porous reality. Until the whistle blows, however, the modern fan prefers the safety of a self-constructed, corporate alignment.
Most rich men quarrel with reporters as subjects of coverage. Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021) did that, and then he did more. He sued reporters. He bought the newspaper that covered him. He founded a newspaper in another country and ran it at a loss for political ends. By the end of his life he had occupied almost every position a man can hold opposite the press at once. He was a subject, a plaintiff, an owner, a competitor, and a builder of media institutions. That range, more than any single lawsuit, makes his career a case study in how great wealth meets the work of reporting.
The reporters who first took his measure wrote in a familiar key. Connie Bruck’s 2008 profile in The New Yorker, “The Brass Ring,” traced a relentless drive for influence that ran from the casino floor to the White House to Jerusalem. Evan Osnos returned to the same figure in The New Yorker in 2012, this time through Macau, where Adelson built the gambling fortune that funded everything else. These pieces set the baseline. They presented a self-made man of enormous energy and a temper for control, and they raised the questions that later litigation would answer in a harder form.
The man the reporters met
The early business press wrote Adelson as a classic American striver. He grew up poor in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston, and he liked to tell the story of borrowing two hundred dollars from an uncle at twelve to sell newspapers on a corner. He moved through dozens of ventures before he found the one that made him. COMDEX, the computer trade show he built in the 1980s, became the largest event of its kind in the world, and its sale gave him the capital to enter the casino business.
What he built next changed Las Vegas. The Venetian shifted the economics of the Strip away from the gambler and toward the convention, the business traveler, and the large corporate event. He carried that model to Asia. The Sands Macao and the Venetian Macao turned a Portuguese backwater into the richest gambling market on earth, and Marina Bay Sands did the same for Singapore’s tourist economy. By the late 2000s he sat among the richest men alive.
Wealth on that scale drew a different kind of attention. Reporters stopped asking only how he made his money. They began to ask how he used it, in American politics, in Israel, and in Macau, where the company he controlled faced United States investigations into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The adversarial coverage that followed gave Adelson his reasons, or his pretexts, for the legal campaign that came to define him.
Sharks in the Desert and the bankrupting of John L. Smith
The central conflict of Adelson’s life with the press centered on one Nevada columnist. John L. Smith of the Las Vegas Review-Journal had already written Running Scared in 2001, a hard book about Steve Wynn that drew a libel claim from Wynn over promotional copy. Smith left that suit because he had not written the offending material. In 2005 he published Sharks in the Desert: The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas, a survey of the men who built modern Las Vegas. Two pages concerned Adelson’s Boston years, his early move into vending machines, and the presence of organized crime in that trade. The book made no firm claim that tied Adelson to the mob, and Smith later conceded it contained errors, but Adelson read the passage as an attack on his name.
He sued for fifteen million dollars. He filed in Los Angeles in 2005 and named both Smith and the publisher, Barricade Books, the house of the late Lyle Stuart. What happened next reveals more about libel litigation than any verdict could. Barricade buckled under the cost of defense. Smith moved the case to Nevada in 2007 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. He fought the suit while his young daughter, Amelia, underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for brain cancer. Adelson offered, by Smith’s account, to place two hundred thousand dollars in a medical and education account for the girl if Smith would admit libel and apologize in court. Smith refused. He has written that the case was never about defamation. He believed Adelson meant to make him an example for any reporter who dared to write about the billionaire.
In 2009 Adelson dismissed the suit with prejudice. Judge Bruce Markell deemed Smith the prevailing party and required Adelson to pay Smith’s costs. On paper the columnist won. By then the publisher lay in ruins and the writer had declared bankruptcy. The judgment could not undo either fact.
This is the lesson the case taught reporters across the country, and it has nothing to do with who held the better legal argument. A defamation suit is a contest of endurance before it is a contest of truth. A billionaire commands a depth of resources that a columnist, a local paper, or a small press cannot reach. Winning a lawsuit and surviving a lawsuit are separate things. The process is the penalty, and the penalty falls before any court rules.
A pattern, not an episode
Smith was not alone. Adelson sued the Las Vegas Sun reporter Jeff Simpson (1960-2011) twice over gaming columns. Both claims failed, and Simpson has described the weight of the litigation even so. Adelson sued the Daily Mail in London, which published an apology and settled in 2008. The frequency tells its own story. His defenders read the suits as a man guarding his reputation against careless reporting. His critics read the pattern as a method, the use of law as a club. One need not settle that question to see the effect on the work.
Editors and reporters who covered Adelson learned that an aggressive story might bring years of legal trouble. That knowledge entered the room before a word reached print. Lawyers reviewed copy. Fact-checking expanded. Publishers priced the risk. Some stories ran anyway, and many did. But the cost of producing them rose, and the suits became part of the weather in which journalism about Adelson took place. The point holds whether or not he won. He shaped the conditions of coverage by raising its price.
The most instructive of the later suits crossed an ocean. Kate O’Keeffe of The Wall Street Journal reported on the Macau operations and on Adelson’s litigation with Steven Jacobs, the fired president of his Macau unit, whose wrongful-termination filing carried the allegation that Adelson had approved a prostitution strategy at the casinos. In a 2012 article she co-wrote with Alexandra Berzon, O’Keeffe described Adelson as “a scrappy, foul-mouthed billionaire from working-class Dorchester, Mass.”
Adelson sued over the word foul-mouthed. He filed in February 2013, not in an American court, but in Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance, a city where he owned casinos and where the law treats libel plaintiffs more kindly than American law does. He named O’Keeffe alone. He left out Berzon, who was based in the United States, and he left out Dow Jones, the deep-pocketed parent that could fund a defense.
The venue was the message. American reporters enjoy unusual protection at home. Under New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), a public figure must prove actual malice to win a defamation claim, a burden that defeats most such suits. Hong Kong, with its roots in British common law, sets a lower bar for the plaintiff. The First Amendment guards a reporter inside the United States. It does not follow her abroad. Global business lets a wealthy plaintiff shop for the forum that suits him, a practice media lawyers call libel tourism or jurisdictional arbitrage. Power crosses borders, and so can the lawsuit that answers it.
O’Keeffe fought back through American courts. She used the federal discovery statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1782, to gather evidence in the United States for use in Hong Kong. She subpoenaed Adelson’s former driver, Kwame Luangisa, in New York, and an architect who had worked with Adelson, Nikita Zukov, in Florida. The Second Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit each let the discovery proceed. The Journal argued in court filings that the suit carried an ulterior aim, to push O’Keeffe off the Macau beat. The case settled in January 2017, with each side bearing its own costs. Adelson, as one writer put it, sued for years and walked away with nothing. The outcome mattered less than the method. The threat to the reporter was no longer simple domestic censorship. The threat now traveled.
The National Jewish Democratic Council
The asymmetry showed plainest against an advocacy group with no newsroom behind it. In the months before the 2012 election, the National Jewish Democratic Council urged Republican candidates to refuse Adelson’s money, calling it tainted, and pointed to the Macau prostitution allegations that had already surfaced in mainstream reporting and in the Jacobs filing. Adelson sued for sixty million dollars.
A Manhattan federal court dismissed the claim. The judge held that calling a donor’s money dirty or tainted, in that context, amounted to constitutionally protected opinion rather than a false statement of fact, and he ordered Adelson to pay the council’s legal fees. The case turned in part on Nevada’s anti-SLAPP statute, the kind of law built to throw out suits filed to silence public speech, and the appeals court sent a question about that statute to the Nevada Supreme Court before the dismissal stood.
On the law the defendants prevailed. On the ledger the picture is less clean. Years of legal expense fell on a small organization, and the council wound down its operations in 2016. Its allies tied the decline in part to the burden of the fight. Anti-SLAPP laws help. They cannot give back the years and the money a defendant spends before the protection arrives, and they vary by state and reach almost nothing abroad. A group can win the argument and still lose the capacity to keep going.
The Review-Journal taken from within
Litigation shows wealth acting on the press through the courts. The purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal shows wealth acting on the press through ownership, and it produced the strangest chapter of the whole story.
In December 2015 a newly formed company called News + Media Capital Group bought Nevada’s largest newspaper for a hundred and forty million dollars, a markup of roughly thirty-seven percent over the price the paper had fetched earlier that year. The buyer hid behind the shell. The only name in the filings belonged to Michael Schroeder, a Connecticut newspaper executive who declined to say who stood behind the money. For a week, the reporters and the readers did not know who owned the paper.
So the reporters investigated their own newsroom. Three of them, Howard Stutz, James DeHaven, and Jennifer Robison, found the thread. A small Connecticut paper Schroeder controlled, the New Britain Herald, had run a September article attacking a Clark County judge, Elizabeth Gonzalez, who oversaw Adelson litigation and who had cut him off in open court with the line, “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me.” A Connecticut paper had no reason to assail a Las Vegas judge unless someone wanted it done. The reporters traced the common ownership, and on December 16 they named Adelson in their own pages. The family confirmed it the next day in a statement printed on page two.
The cost came fast. The editor, Michael Hengel, who had backed the internal investigation, took a buyout and left within weeks. Staff reported that a quote questioning the new ownership had been cut from a story without the reporter’s knowledge. A later editor, J. Keith Moyer, told a journalists’ panel that Smith would not write about Adelson while he held the chair, and he extended the ban to Steve Wynn. Smith, the man Adelson had once sued into bankruptcy, now found himself working for Adelson, forbidden to write about him. He resigned in 2016. Within about a year, all three reporters who exposed the sale had left the paper.
The episode turned the Review-Journal into a national lesson in media ethics. The old question had been whether a billionaire could bend journalism through the courts. The new question was whether he could bend it through the deed of sale, and the answer, in Las Vegas, came quickly.
Israel Hayom and the building of a press
The American record alone misses half of the man. To see the whole, look to Israel. In July 2007 Adelson founded Israel Hayom, a daily tabloid, and he gave it away. Free distribution removed the price barrier, and within weeks the paper reached a circulation its rivals could not touch. By the 2010s it had the widest readership in the country.
He did not run it to make money. By one accounting reported in Haaretz, the paper lost roughly a hundred and ninety million dollars from its launch through 2014, and Adelson covered the gap year after year. He ran it for politics. Israelis named it the Bibiton, a pun on Benjamin Netanyahu‘s nickname and the Hebrew word for newspaper, because it praised Netanyahu, defended him through his scandals, and attacked his rivals. The Israeli right had long held that the established press despised Netanyahu, and the paper offered the corrective they wanted. The relationship grew close enough to surface in a criminal investigation, the recorded talks in which Netanyahu and a rival publisher discussed trading coverage for limits on Israel Hayom.
Here the comparison with Steve Wynn falls apart. Wynn built resorts and fought the reporters who covered them. Adelson built resorts, fought the reporters, and then built the press itself. Many rich men seek favorable coverage. Adelson invested in the production of coverage. He grasped a newspaper as a source of power and not merely an obstacle to it, which places him in a longer line that runs through William Randolph Hearst, Robert Maxwell, and Rupert Murdoch. His significance reaches past Nevada and past the casino floor. He belongs to the history of men who set out to own the institutions that decide what the public knows.
The shape of the whole
Read together, the episodes describe a single fact rather than a string of separate fights. The fact is asymmetry. Adelson did not always win. He lost to Smith, lost to O’Keeffe, lost to the Democratic council, and saw his own reporters expose his secret purchase. The common thread is not victory. It is the scale of the resources he could bring, on a level no columnist, no small press, no advocacy group, and no local paper could meet. That gap shaped every contact. It shaped the suits, the venue choices, the ownership, and the daily calculations inside newsrooms about what they could afford to print.
A few lessons follow. National organizations may outlast prolonged litigation, while local papers, independent publishers, and individual reporters often cannot. Anti-SLAPP statutes give real defenses, yet they differ by state and offer little against a suit filed overseas. Ownership changes editorial culture faster than most readers expect, as the Review-Journal showed in a matter of weeks. And the protection a reporter relies on at home, the high wall built by Sullivan, ends at the border, while the wealth that funds a transnational suit does not.
The old picture of the press casts the reporter as the one who investigates the powerful. The Adelson record complicates the picture without erasing it. The powerful man here investigated the reporters. He sued them. He bought their paper. He founded papers of his own. He moved his claims across jurisdictions, and he reached into the institutions that define public reality. For that reason his quarrel with journalists amounts to more than the biography of a casino magnate. It is a study in the strain that great private wealth places on the work of public knowledge, and in the stubbornness of reporters who, in his case more than once, did the work anyway.
Posted inLas Vegas|Comments Off on Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists
On the surface the new feature documentary Autumn Gold tells the story of veterans exposed to chemical and biological weapons testing during the Cold War, and of the journalist who carried their accounts into public view. Beneath that story sits a larger inquiry. The film studies how modern institutions handle knowledge, divide responsibility, and postpone the moment of reckoning. It treats memory, secrecy, institutional power, and the narrowing place of investigative journalism as a single subject.
Director Kern Konwiser builds the film around the reporting of Eric Longabardi. Together they reconstruct a struggle that runs across decades, the effort to expose secret military testing and to win recognition for the men it harmed. The film follows Longabardi into programs that stayed hidden for 40 years and traces what that concealment cost the servicemen who were used as human guinea pigs without their consent.
The historical core lies in the Cold War testing program Project SHAD (a subset of Project 112). Conducted through the 1960s and early 1970s, these programs exposed thousands of American sailors and soldiers as well as the general public (clouds of bacteria and dangerous chemicals wafted over Hawaii, Canada and other places in 1963) to chemical and biological agents to assess military readiness against chemical weapons (both offensive and defensive). All tests released hazardous substances, among them the nerve agents VX and Sarin. The decontaminants used were known carcinogens that caused cancer. Almost nobody learned the nature of the work they joined.
For four decades these programs stayed concealed. The Pentagon denied the existence of the programs. Veterans who suffered respiratory illness, neurological disorders, and cancers often lacked the records to link their service to their sickness. Under pressure from CBS reporting (developed by Longabardi) in May of 2000, the Veterans Administration pushed the Department of Defense to assist with identifying exposed veterans (following years of congressional pressure, and demands from veterans’ organizations).
The film’s reach goes past the facts of Project SHAD. Its deeper achievement lies in how it shows large institutions hiding information without a central conspiracy. The documentary draws bureaucracy as a structure of divided knowledge.
Consider how the testing programs spread knowledge across layers of authority. A project commander knows where a ship will deploy and when a test will run. A scientist understands the chemistry of what gets released. A medical officer watches short-term reactions among the men aboard. No single person holds the whole picture.
This division of knowledge serves the organization. It guards classified information and limits unauthorized disclosure. It also scatters responsibility. A man performs his assigned task and stays blind to the larger result. Ethical duty thins into procedure.
In 1998, CNN almost pulled the trigger on releasing this story (developed by Longabardi) but then the Operation Tailwinds scandal hit and CNN and CBS pulled back. (2025 update.)
Max Weber (1864-1920) described bureaucracy as a defining form of the modern order. Bureaucracies coordinate, sustain efficiency, and endure. Weber also warned that such systems can harden into impersonal structures ruled by rules rather than moral judgment. Autumn Gold gives the warning a face. The veterans met no single decision-maker. They met an apparatus that had spread responsibility across offices, agencies, and decades.
The result was a wall of collective deniability. When veterans asked about the chemical weapons program and their illnesses, no one official would supply a full account. Records sat classified, incomplete, scattered, or sealed. The information lived somewhere inside the system, and the system made retrieval almost impossible.
The film shows that veterans faced a strange legal and administrative trap. They had to prove that their illness came from their service. The records that might furnish that proof sat in the hands of the institutions under scrutiny.
Secrecy produced an empty space where evidence should stand. Officials could treat the absence of documents as evidence that no link existed between service and later illness. The veterans circled inside a closed loop. They could not gain benefits without proving exposure, and they could not prove exposure while the relevant material stayed hidden.
Even if they could prove exposure, they then had to prove “service connected disability” to get benefits.
The film presents the Freedom of Information Act as an instrument of democratic accountability, a way to force hidden institutional knowledge into the open. The archive becomes contested ground. Documents once kept to protect secrecy turn into evidence against the official account.
Longabardi reminds the viewer that large investigations rarely spring from a single dramatic disclosure. They grow from years of document requests, interviews, legal fights, and archival labor against institutional resistance.
Much of today’s journalism prizes speed. News organizations race to publish within minutes of an event. Commentary runs without pause. Opinion costs little to make and travels fast. Investigative reporting runs on another clock. It asks for time, evidence, expertise, legal backing, and money.
The documentary raises a question without stating it aloud. Can modern media still carry this kind of work? As newspapers merge and newsroom budgets shrink, resources drift toward cheaper forms of content. Long investigations grow hard to justify where audience metrics rule the day.
Investigative journalism long served as a way for democratic societies to watch powerful institutions. When newsrooms retreat from it, oversight does not vanish. It moves toward independent reporters, nonprofits, and small teams that work with fewer resources and thinner protection.
The film places Longabardi inside that shrinking tradition. His work rests on a view of journalism rooted in discovery. The journalist serves as investigator, archivist, and advocate for what the public has a right to know.
The film also reflects on secrecy and self-government. The modern state needs expertise. Citizens cannot directly oversee military planning, intelligence work, or advanced research. Some secrecy comes with the territory.
Yet secrecy creates gaps of knowledge. Officials hold what citizens cannot see. Institutions control the records, the data, and the experts. Democratic accountability depends on tools that can challenge that imbalance.
Facing the threat of nuclear war and unconventional weapons, military planners worked under heavy assumptions of necessity. Programs that might have looked intolerable in calmer times found justification in the name of national security. The film does not deny the reality of great-power rivalry. It asks how a free society keeps accountability alive when secrecy turns permanent.
The film’s freshest move lies in its treatment of time as a political and administrative force. Most arguments about accountability center on evidence, law, or ethics. Autumn Gold points to another factor. Delay.
Delay arises from calculation, from inertia, or from sheer procedural weight, and it shapes the outcome of contests between citizens and large organizations. Declassification reviews take years. Administrative appeals crawl. Litigation stretches across decades. Medical claims sit unresolved through layer after layer of review.
For aging veterans, time carries no neutrality. Each year of delay thins the ranks of surviving claimants and witnesses. Each postponed ruling narrows the chance of a real remedy. By the time recognition arrives, many of the men are gone.
The film treats this as power built into structure. Accountability turns backward-looking. Truth surfaces after the chance for correction has mostly passed.
The title comes from the regular timing of the testing — around dusk. In addition, autumn calls up the late season of a life, a time of harvest and decline. Gold suggests worth and achievement. Together they hold the film’s central sorrow. Truth comes, but it comes in the autumn of the participants’ lives. Recognition arrives once the moment for repair has slipped away.
The film studies the standing tension between power and knowledge in a democratic society. Institutions hold great capacity for concealment, delay, and self-protection. Determined men can still challenge those structures. Journalists, veterans, archivists, lawyers, and witnesses can gather scattered fragments into a coherent account that institutions would rather keep buried.
Seen this way, Autumn Gold joins a long American line of investigative inquiry. Like the muckrakers of the Progressive Era, the reporters who published the Pentagon Papers, and the investigative press of the Watergate years, it treats public knowledge as a condition of democratic accountability. Its achievement runs beyond recording a forgotten chapter of Cold War history. It shows how truth gets suppressed, contested, and at last recovered.
The closing lesson sobers and encourages at once. Bureaucracies can hide information for decades. They can split responsibility, stall accountability, and outlive many of their critics. Secrecy never holds forever. Archives remain. Documents survive. Witnesses persist. The pursuit of truth runs slow, costly, and uncertain. Autumn Gold argues that it stays possible.
Posted inJournalism, Military|Comments Off on Autumn Gold: Secrecy, Time, and the Recovery of Truth
Eric Longabardi (b. 1964) belongs to a generation of American investigative journalists whose careers track the passage from network television’s dominance to the scattered digital order of the twenty-first century. He built his reputation on military secrecy, government accountability, aviation security, and public corruption, and his career reveals the promise and the peril of investigative work conducted inside and outside large institutions.
Longabardi grew up in Southern California and trained at San Diego State University, where he took a degree in television and film production and broadcast management around the close of the 1980s. His formation in television, rather than in the metropolitan newspaper newsroom, shaped his method and his manner. Television of that period rewarded reporting that paired documentary evidence with strong visual narrative. Longabardi absorbed both halves of the lesson. He approached a story with the patience of a records researcher and the timing of a broadcast producer.
Prior to 2000, Longabardi was a corporate media employee. After that, he worked on contract and then independently.
Early work placed him inside the competitive culture of broadcast journalism, where an investigation had to satisfy the editor and hold the viewer. He produced for CBS News out of its Los Angeles bureau, contributing to CBS Evening News and to 60 Minutes II, and later produced for CNN, where he covered the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and for six years with Brian Ross at ABC News. These years gave him a producer’s command of pacing and sourcing and a reporter’s appetite for documents that institutions preferred to keep filed away.
“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories until they are proven true,” Longabardi tells me June 3, 2026.
On September 12, 2001, Longabardi, who has never been sued for any of his stories, broke the news via CNN that all of the terror pilots were trained and licensed in the US.
His scoops kept coming.
His most consequential reporting concerned Project SHAD, short for Shipboard Hazard and Defense, a set of classified Cold War tests run by the United States Department of Defense. Across the late 1990s and into national broadcasts on CBS Evening News in 2000 and after, work he labeled BioWar, Longabardi broke the story of veterans who said the military had used them as human guinea pigs by exposing them to chemical and biological agents without their knowledge or consent. Starting in 1993, he began gathering government records and sat with former service members whose experiences had drawn little notice. The BioWar series took top honors in the Best of the West journalism awards.
The reporting drove Congress to hold hearings and federal agencies opened reviews. The Defense Department released large quantities of material it had held as classified. Members of Congress credited the press with forcing the matter into public view. The episode showed that a single determined reporter might still pry loose information lodged for decades inside a bureaucratic archive.
Project SHAD also displayed the habit that ran through his work. Longabardi distrusted official secrecy. He leaned on records, declassified files, court documents, and the testimony of insiders rather than on the briefings and access that flow to reporters who keep officials comfortable. Much of his output rested on a single conviction, that important truths sit buried inside administrative systems more often than they hide behind elaborate conspiracy. The method asked for persistence, for the slow acquisition of documents, and for a willingness to chase stories that larger newsrooms judged too obscure or too costly.
A second body of work won him the broadcast profession’s highest honor. His multi-part series on the role of American law enforcement in firearm sales received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 2001, the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The Los Angeles Press Club twice named him Television Journalist of the Year, in 2000 and again in 2008. The United States Senate commended his investigative reporting. These honors place his early career inside the mainstream of award-winning network journalism, a point worth holding in view when his later independence drew suspicion.
After September 11, 2001, Longabardi turned much of his attention to aviation security and counterterrorism. He examined airport screening, transport weak points, and the state of government preparedness. The work answered a broad public anxiety of the period, when each security lapse became a national alarm. He relied again on insiders ready to describe bureaucratic failure and operational gaps, and he pressed at the distance between official assurance and institutional performance.
He investigated the FBI’s Amerithrax inquiry into the 2001 anthrax letters that killed five people and sickened seventeen. The Department of Justice concluded that Bruce Ivins (1946-2008), an Army biodefense scientist at Fort Detrick in Maryland, had sent the letters; Ivins took his own life in 2008 before any charge. Longabardi reported on the case at length and claimed to be the first to lay out Ivins’s movements and the so-called window of opportunity on the mailing dates, tracing his whereabouts at the Fort Detrick laboratory. He obtained nine batches of Ivins’s email under the Freedom of Information Act and placed the records in the public domain through an archive, an act consistent with his preference for letting readers inspect the evidence.
That impulse defined the next phase of his career. Longabardi came up as newspaper revenues fell, as networks cut investigative budgets, and as independent online publishing opened ground for reporters ready to work apart from the legacy houses. Through TheEnterpriseReport.com, an online investigative site he founded and published, he sought a platform answerable to no network desk. The Los Angeles Press Club named the site Best Online Website in 2008 and other awards.
The site reflected a turn that ran across journalism in those years. Longabardi did more than publish finished stories. He posted the underlying material, the public records, the responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, the court filings, alongside the reporting. The practice anticipated a later norm of digital journalism, the move toward transparency and direct reader access to primary sources. By inviting readers to weigh the documents themselves, he tried to anchor his conclusions in evidence and to lean less on the authority of a masthead.
The same independence that freed his work also exposed it. Longabardi’s career ran into a long argument over credibility, editorial oversight, and standards. Critics held that independent investigators sometimes lacked the safeguards that help a newsroom separate a supported finding from a guess. The sharpest of these disputes came from Los Angeles media observers. Kevin Roderick, the veteran journalist behind the site LA Observed and a former senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, wrote in 2008 that Longabardi pressed claims his evidence could not carry and treated tentative leads as confirmed scoops, and that he had grown wary of linking to the site. Roderick’s complaint named a structural problem that dogs the independent investigator. Absent an editor to check tone and test an assumption, even accurate reporting can read as overstatement, and the impression of overreach can erode trust in the underlying facts.
Set against his record, these quarrels reveal less about the man than about a changing media order. Through much of the twentieth century, the large newspaper and the broadcast network served as validators of investigative work. By the early twenty-first century, digital tools let a reporter bypass those houses. The change widened the field for independent inquiry and shifted the burden of verification and credibility from the organization onto the individual.
Money sharpened the difficulty. The independent investigator rarely commands the legal, financial, and institutional cover that protects a reporter on a major payroll. Longabardi’s career illustrates the strain. Investigative work costs money. Public-records litigation, document acquisition, travel, and legal review all demand resources, and the independent reporter must fund them through consulting, freelance production, partnerships, or other ventures. The central obstacle for the independent investigator is therefore as much economic as editorial. Freedom from institutional constraint carries the price of institutional support.
The broader interest of Longabardi’s career lies in what it shows about the long arc of investigative journalism. He stands within a line that runs from the muckrakers of the Progressive Era to the digital investigators of the present. That tradition holds that important information stays hidden because powerful institutions profit from secrecy, and its practitioners work at the edges of established systems, after stories others pass over.
The same tradition carries the hazards his career displays. The independent investigator holds a precarious place. His freedom lets him challenge the institutional account. His want of institutional backing leaves him open to doubt, to financial exposure, and to damage to his name. The traits that make him useful often make him a figure of dispute.
For that reason Longabardi reads as a representative figure in the remaking of American investigative journalism rather than as a lone reporter. His career spans the fall of the network-centered order and the rise of entrepreneurial digital publishing, and it carries the strengths and the weaknesses of the independent model together. His admirers point to Project SHAD and to a wall of awards as evidence that a determined individual might still uncover matters of national weight. His critics point to moments when the language around an investigation outran what the evidence could settle. The two readings do not cancel. They describe one career. Longabardi’s legacy rests on a sustained will to pursue what powerful institutions preferred to bury, and on a readiness to do so without the shelter of a large newsroom. Tenacious investigator, media entrepreneur, contested outsider, he holds a place in the recent history of investigative reporting and in the wider account of how journalism met the digital age.
‘What Does It Mean To ‘Share’ Pulitzer Prizes That Never Named You?’
From Kevin Roderick’s bio: "Kevin is a Contributing Writer at Los Angeles magazine, reporting mostly on politics and media. Before launching LA Observed in 2003 he was the founding Los Angeles bureau chief for the late Industry Standard magazine. Before that he spent two decades as a staff writer, line editor and senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, specializing in in-depth projects and coverage of politics, urban affairs and the state of California. He shared in two Pulitzer Prizes awarded for staff coverage of the Rodney King riots and the Northridge earthquake."
Does that mean that everyone who worked on these series (must be more than 50 people) shared in these Pulitzers? Does it mean his name is inscribed on the Pulitzers (awarded in 1993 and 1995, right?)? I don’t think you can claim a Pulitzer unless you were specifically awarded one.
When the LA Times won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Northridge earthquake, all the stories were bylined. Kevin Roderick’s name was not on the bylines. He was an editor in the Metro section but I’m not sure they give Pulitzers for editing. It seems like a stretch to say that you shared in a Pulitzer when your name wasn’t on any of the stories awarded.
Luke: "Which members of the media have taken greatest exception to your writing on them?"
Cathy: "Robert Scheer is still resentful and he refers to me as evil. There was a funny time when I called up Noel Greenwood, an old City editor at the LA Times. I had to ask him if he did have an affair with Carol Stogsdill, the really mean sub-editor that everybody hated and was the then-ranking woman at the Times."
Luke: "That’s a horrible question to have to ask."
Cathy agrees. "I was very dutiful. I call him up. ‘I’m sorry I have to ask you this but…’ He replies, ‘Hahaha, that’s none of your business.’ I say, ‘That’s fair enough. I just had to ask you.’ And I’m about to say goodbye, when he says, ‘And I don’t respect your work.’ Click.
"That’s one advantage that calling people has over email. You’d much rather email people that question but if you don’t call them, you don’t hear their voice. I confirmed that he’s pompous and insufferable, which couldn’t have been done through email. Noel was angry."
Kevin Roderick: ‘Eric Longabardi, the Pulitzers and me’
I was an assistant metropolitan editor at the Los Angeles Times when the Rodney King riots erupted in April, 1992 and the Northridge earthquake struck on Jan. 17, 1994. Huge stories, of course, and everyone in Metro was thrown into round-the-clock riot and quake duty. Excellent coverage resulted and the Pulitzer Prize for spot news was awarded “to the staff of the Los Angeles Times” in 1993 and 1995. The prizes went up on a wall somewhere at the Times and the cash was donated, as I recall. Those of us who worked on the stories got a little 5×7 acrylic rectangle with embedded front pages from the Pulitzer-winning days. Most of us tossed the plaques in boxes, made a note for our resumes and moved on.
In 1997 I became the paper’s Senior Projects Editor, working with investigative stories and series (and more Pulitzer winners.) In 1999 or so I got a call from a freelance TV producer named Eric Longabardi asking to collaborate with the Times on some investigative project. I don’t recall the details, but something about him didn’t feel right and I passed. The next time I heard of him, Longabardi was trying to peddle an investigation that TV outlets had rejected about the 9-11 hijackers in Arizona. In 2005 he got hold of me via email — “I am a faithful reader of LA-O — you do a superb job with the site” — to ask for advice on an investigative book.
Through 2006 I received several emails dangling tidbits of investigations he claimed to be working on for ABC or others, but his teasers tended to over-promise. In March 2006, for instance, I thanked him for pointing me to an ABC story that he claimed would prove a shoulder-fired missile was launched at an LAX jetliner. After seeing the story my note to him said “it’s not that convincing.”
That became our pattern — Longabardi would email some flattery and an intriguing tidbit, but his “scoop” would often turn out to be over-hyped. He started the ERS News website last year to flack his work, and I cautiously noted a couple of his posts. But I came to not trust his “exposes” and quietly stopped linking to them. Longabardi’s emails — now totaling five dozen — grew more bitter and insulting.
This all leads, predictably, to yesterday when he posted a long piece claiming — erroneously and without checking with me or the Times — that my online bios overstate my connection to those staff Pulitzers fifteen years ago. On these kind of phony hits motivated by link envy, the backstory is the most interesting part.
Longabardi’s hit piece on me grew, strangely enough, out of the Mayor Villaraigosa – Mirthala Salinas brouhaha last summer. At LA Observed I was linking to revelations and good reporting from all sorts of sources and devoting KCRW commentaries to the scandal. Longabardi emailed several links claiming that he had broken this or that scoop, and I linked to some of them.
But I recognized the old pattern of Longabardi claiming gets he didn’t really have down and making more of his evidence than a sober editor would buy. I grew increasingly uncomfortable about giving his stuff credibility. One of his posts, pitched as revealing something else, dropped in the flat claim that Villaraigosa was dating a city staffer, with unsubstantiated specifics. My BS filter stayed on high from then on when it came to Longabardi. I think I’ve linked to his site just twice this year. I never check it, and only learn of something there if I get email or if some other blog falls for his incessant email come-ons.
Our emails remained cordial for awhile. “Just making sure you saw the new 2 new stories and the treasure trove of exclusive pics of Mayor V and Salinas posted today,” he sent, in part, on July 10 last year. I responded: “Thanks. I don’t see anything in it for me, but I’ll keep watching.”
His first email in August pleaded in the subject line, “Come on kevin .. throw a little love ersnews.com’s link way.” In September, he got madder about not being mentioned in my Los Angeles Magazine story about the scandal. “Amazingly not a single mention of ERS News…,” he emailed, in part. “Not that big of a big deal but you managed to mention everybody else involved, including media outlets barely involved in reporting the story at all….I found it amazing such a good reporter like you could have such a glaring oversight.”
In November, Longbardi started to get the hint. “It’s clear you don’t even read ERS anymore — so you’re missing a lot — you haven’t posted a single item in a long time (clearly showing your bias and bent)…,” said part of one email. His New Year’s email to me (subject line: “Thanks for the crumbs Kevin. you bias continues to show through”) disclosed that he had been grousing about me to blogger Luke Ford.
Remember that name.
This March I grew tired of Longabardi’s email harangues. I called him an asshole and wrote, “these whines shredded your cred a long time ago. from the errors and wildly off base claims you make in these screeds i’d be hard pressed to trust anything i see your name on.” His reply directed a few insults my way and said, “Im still waiting for you to write about my work — why don’t put your money where you’re big mouth is and use your personal opinion blog to so so. You don’t cause just like the LA Times, if you do you risk being OUTED.”
Remember that threat.
We exchanged a few more insults, with Longabardi repeatedly accusing me of supposedly not taking my “meds” — huh? I barely even use aspirin. He also seemed fixated on Pulitzers: “call your Pulizter buddies at the LAT they’re your ass kissing professional guide to factual accuracy, ethics and journalistic credibility.” [Spelling and punctuation within quotes are his, throughout.] Several Longabardi messages ranted, strangely, that Chuck Philips had won a Pulitzer for the Times in the beat reporting category, not investigative reporting, and so LA Observed should not call him a “Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter.”
The last time I received an insult from Longabardi was March 27. In April, he got Luke Ford to post a hit claiming that it’s bogus for me to mention in my bio that I “shared in two Pulitzer Prizes awarded for staff coverage of the Rodney King riots and the Northridge earthquake.” Besides the big lie — that I’m somehow cheating — Ford’s post was riddled with lack of understanding of the Pulitzer process.
Longabardi flacked his Ford-assisted hit job to other bloggers and encouraged them to keep pursuing the angle. None did, that I know about. So now comes Longabardi’s new hit this week. “Turns out Roderick’s claims are false,” ERS News writes, without byline. But it’s prototypically Longabardi. Over-amped premise, sloppy reporting, and a leap to a conclusion unsupported by the facts.
He bases his case on Ford’s erroneous post, plus a conversation with the Pulitzer director who says nothing about me or the Times — and PDFs of Pulitzer documents that clearly state the Times entries are for staff work. Longabardi makes a big deal that my name is not mentioned anywhere in the docs. Dishonestly, though, he leaves out that no editors are mentioned. Most of the reporters and photographers and other journalists who I worked with for long days and nights aren’t mentioned either. That’s not how staff Pulitzer entries work.
The Times editor pictured on the Pulitzer page accepting the prize in 1995 is Carol Stogsdill, who as the top Times editor over the Metro staff oversaw the quake coverage. She was my boss then, and after a decade or so hiatus recently became my boss again. When I told her yesterday that Eric friggin’ Longabardi was accusing me of falsely claiming a connection to those staff Pulitzers, she laughed. And laughed.
These integrity sellouts over link envy show how far the Los Angeles blogosphere still has to go, in my opinion. Longabardi also proves that some reporters need editors to keep them honest. My instinct was right about him in 1999: he couldn’t be trusted to get the story right.
The Editor He No Longer Had: Eric Longabardi and Stephen Turner on the Tacit
A newsroom editor transmits, through correction and friction, an unspoken sense of how much a given pile of evidence can carry, when a lead is firm enough to print, how to pitch a claim so it reads as warranted. None of that sits in a manual. Longabardi worked without it once he left the networks. Roderick’s complaint, that he claimed more than a sober editor would buy, names the gap. The failure according to Roderick is one of calibration, the kind only tacit training installs.
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) would correct one word in that opening. Transmits says too much. Across The Social Theory of Practices, Turner denies that a newsroom holds a shared body of tacit standards handed down intact from editor to reporter. No collective rule sits inside the institution waiting to be downloaded. What an editor does is supply feedback, one correction after another, until the reporter’s own habits settle into a usable shape. The competence lives in the individual and grows from a particular history of exposure. Two strong reporters at the same desk carry overlapping habits, never identical ones. They mesh well enough to coordinate, and the meshing gets mistaken for a shared rule. The shared rule is a fiction we read back into a set of private dispositions that happen to fit.
Take the calibration as individual habit tuned by feedback and a consequence follows. The habit needs the feedback to stay tuned. Turner makes expertise a maintained condition rather than a possession banked once and kept. Pull a reporter out of the correcting environment and nothing holds his habits in true. They drift, and the drift hides from the man who drifts, because the same dispositions that produce his judgment also judge it.
The next move is Turner on expertise, the argument of Understanding the Tacit and The Politics of Expertise. Expert judgment rests on tacit competence the layman cannot inspect. So the public never weighed Longabardi’s evidentiary calls on their merits. It could not. It trusted a proxy. The network logo carried the trust, a second-order cue that licensed belief without the reader assessing the competence underneath. Strip the logo and the reader loses the proxy and reaches for whatever cue remains. A critic supplies one. Roderick holds the Los Angeles Times trained disposition. He feels the overclaim the way a seasoned hand hears a wrong note, ahead of any account of why it is wrong. The quarrel is two expert calibrations meeting.
This frames the transparency the bio dwells on. Posting the FOIA returns and the court records is an attempt to make the judgment explicit, to let the files speak so that no editor is needed. Turner’s central claim cuts straight across the hope. The tacit does not convert into the explicit without remainder. What an editor supplied was a weighing, a feel for how far a given record reaches, and that feel never existed as a set of statable rules to be printed beside the story. Hand the reader the raw files and you have not handed him the weighing. You have shifted the interpretive load onto someone with even less of the acquired competence than the reporter who gathered them. The documents read as settled evidence and work as an invitation to a judgment the reader cannot make. The earnest gesture toward openness cannot recover the thing it means to replace, because the thing was never explicit to start with.
The same frame deflates the charge laid against him. The familiar version says Longabardi broke the standards of the profession, as though a normative order hung above the work and he stepped across it. Turner, in Explaining the Normative, will not grant the order. No free-standing rule waits out there to be violated. There are trained expectations and the feedback that builds them, and nothing more. What we name a breach of standards is a mismatch between his settled habits and the expectations of readers whose habits formed under different correction. The vocabulary of violation smuggles in a normative realm Turner refuses. The plainer description holds: freelance drift on one side, a guild sense of fit on the other, and a collision between them.
So the credibility problem sits in the conditions of the work, not the character of the man. The independent investigator carries his competence into a setting that no longer maintains it, then offers documents in place of the judgment that documents cannot carry. The awards say the apprenticeship took. The later disputes say the apprenticeship needed an environment he surrendered when he went out alone.
McEnerney asks where value comes from. He says the reader’s community grants it, the writer’s effort does not. When Longabardi moved out of work for leading TV networks, he lost the audience that arrived pre-validated by a network logo and he had to win credibility from readers who owed him none. Posting the FOIA files, the court records, the raw documents, that is him trying to move the source of credibility out of the masthead he no longer had and into material the reader can check for himself. McEnerney gives you a clean account of the move and of why it only half works.
Start from the inversion at the center of Larry McEnerney’s teaching. Value does not live in the text. A reader grants it. The most diligent reporting on earth is worth nothing until a community of readers decides it serves them. Run Longabardi’s network years through the claim and the logo changes meaning. CBS did not make his reporting good. CBS made the audience grant it standing before a frame of tape rolled. The mark of the house did the conferring. Viewers extended belief because the institution had already vouched, and the vouching arrived ahead of the evidence. Easy to mistake the grant for the work. Longabardi, like most people inside a strong house, drew authority from a source he did not own and might not have noticed he was using.
Strip the logo and the conferring stops. On the independent site he faces readers who owe him nothing and a watchful professional set who owe him less. McEnerney presses one question ahead of any other: who are your readers and what do they value. The network audience valued the finished, vetted broadcast and took the vetting on trust. His new readers include men like Roderick whose test is evidentiary restraint and whose value-language flags an overclaim on sight. Longabardi kept filing as though the old grant still stood. He addressed a community that no longer existed and met a new one without learning what it would honor.
McEnerney says a writer earns the grant by showing readers a problem, a cost they carry while it stays unsolved, and then settling it in their terms. Hold his own record against the test and it sorts. Project SHAD posed a problem the polity and the Congress recognized as costly, servicemen used in secret experiments and a government that buried the record, and the reporting forced a resolution, hearings and disclosure. The relevant communities granted value, and the awards record the grant.
McEnerney gives much of his Chicago talk to a habit school installs and the world punishes: writing to display effort, to show a paid reader that you did the work and learned the material. The teasers carry that smell. Look what I found, look how hard I dug, look at the scoop I broke. The aim there is display of the writer, not service to the reader’s values. The Pulitzer fixation belongs to the same instinct, the grown man still hunting the authority’s gold star. McEnerney’s whole teaching cuts against it. No prize confers value. The community of readers who use the work confers it, and the work earns the grant through use, never through the writer’s hunger to be marked excellent.
The professional reader reads register before he reads facts. McEnerney calls the value-laden words a community shares its code, the markers that tell readers a writer holds their values and grasps their stakes. The trained journalist hedges, attributes, qualifies, and the restraint signals membership. Longabardi dropped the code. He pitched tentative leads in the flat present of established fact. To Roderick’s community the missing qualifiers read as a man who does not share their values, so the community withheld the grant before weighing a single document.
Posting documents moves the basis of credibility off the masthead you lost and onto material a reader can check. Yet value sits no more in the documents than it sat in the logo. Value is the reader’s grant, given when a writer shows him a problem he owns and settles it in language that meets his values. A wall of FOIA files hands the reader raw material and asks him to perform the conferring himself, to be his own editor, his own community, his own grant. Most readers will not, and most cannot. The masthead used to confer. The documents cannot confer the same way. Only an argument shaped to the readers’ values confers, and that shaping is the work an editor once modeled for him, the first member of the audience telling him whether the rest will grant. He gave up the man who stood in for the readers and offered the readers a filing cabinet in his place. The cabinet is honest. It is not yet valuable, because value was never a property of the paper. It is always something the reader does.
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The story of Steve Wynn (b. 1942) and the reporters who covered him reaches past one casino executive and the writers who tracked him. It opens onto the relationship between concentrated private wealth and the institutions meant to scrutinize it. For nearly half a century Wynn stood near the center of the reinvention of Las Vegas, and for most of that span he held many roles at once. He was a large employer. He was a source of advertising revenue. He was a civic icon, a political donor, a celebrity, and among the wealthiest men in Nevada. A journalist who set out to examine him had to reckon with all of those roles together. The record that resulted, the books and lawsuits and killed stories and constitutional petitions, forms a revealing chapter in American journalism, because the reporters who did the hardest work often won the factual fight and still paid for years in money, in career, and in court.
Through the Golden Nugget, the Mirage, Treasure Island, Bellagio, Wynn Las Vegas, and Encore, Wynn helped turn the city from a gambling town into a global luxury brand. His admirers saw a builder whose imagination reshaped the economics of hospitality. His critics saw a familiar American figure, the charismatic tycoon whose wealth buys both applause and insulation. The literature about him carries that tension from the first page. Writers, biographers, and investigators kept circling the same question. Was Wynn a creative builder, a political operator, a hard businessman, or all three at once? The answers arrived in four waves, and each wave reveals something about how the press handles a powerful local subject.
The builder’s story
The earliest serious accounts mostly accepted the frame Wynn promoted. They presented a visionary whose medium happened to be casinos, and the frame held real plausibility, because the accomplishments resisted denial. The Mirage opened in 1989 and changed what a casino resort could be. It brought a scale of luxury and spectacle the Strip had not seen. Bellagio pushed the model further with dancing fountains, a gallery of museum-grade paintings, luxury retail, and a studied attention to surface and light. Business writers cast Wynn as an impresario more than an executive. They wrote about design, risk, financing, and brand. The stage happened to hold thousands of hotel rooms and billions in capital.
Such portraits fit a long American habit of crediting one man with the will behind a vast enterprise. Henry Ford (1863-1947), Walt Disney (1901-1966), Steve Jobs (1955-2011), and Elon Musk (b. 1971) all drew the same treatment, the firm read as an extension of one imagination. Wynn entered that lineage as the man who supposedly refined Las Vegas through luxury. These accounts get the facts right. Wynn did transform the city. They fail by omission. They treat the resorts as the whole story and stop there. A second group of writers asked a harder question. What financing, what political arrangements, and what legal structures made the resorts possible?
The sharpest early challenge to the Wynn myth came from John L. Smith and his book Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn, published in 1995. Smith approached from a different door. He began with power rather than architecture. In his telling Wynn reads as a force operating inside Nevada’s institutions more than as a builder. The resorts still hold their place, but they sit within a larger account of family history, gambling debts, financing relationships, political ties, and the aggressive tactics that often shadowed Wynn’s deals.
Timing gave the book its charge. Most critical business biographies appear after the subject retires, dies, or fades. Smith wrote while Wynn held as much power as any private man in the state. The consequences came fast.
The catalog, the verdict, and the reversal
A common misreading holds that Wynn sued over the book. He sued over an advertisement. In 1994 Barricade Books, run by the veteran publisher Lyle Stuart (1922-2006), announced the coming book in a trade catalog. The copy declared that the book detailed why a confidential Scotland Yard report had called Wynn a front man for the Genovese family, a reputed New York crime organization. Wynn sued Smith, Stuart, and Barricade over that line. The court dismissed Smith on summary judgment, since he had not written the advertisement, and the case went to trial against the publisher.
In August 1997 a Clark County jury found for Wynn and awarded $3,173,000 in compensatory and punitive damages against Stuart and Barricade. The award pushed the small house toward bankruptcy. Here the structural problem shows itself. An author draws the public attention, yet the publisher carries the financial risk, and a wealthy plaintiff does not need a final victory to inflict the damage. The cost of the defense becomes the punishment.
The case ran on. In January 2001 the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the judgment and ordered a new trial in Wynn v. Smith. The court held that the trial judge had given the jury a faulty instruction on actual malice. The instruction let jurors find malice if the publisher entertained doubt about the Scotland Yard document, when the law requires serious doubt. The omission of a single word undid a multimillion-dollar verdict. The same ruling declined to extend the fair-report privilege to an unofficial, non-public Scotland Yard report, a holding with its own weight for reporters who rely on leaked or confidential documents. In 2004 Wynn and Stuart settled on confidential terms, and Stuart signed a letter saying he had not meant to imply that Wynn served as a front man for the Genovese family.
Read whole, the case became a study in litigation as attrition. Wynn won at trial, drove a small publisher toward ruin, lost on appeal, and closed with a quiet settlement. Whatever the doctrine said at the end, the years of exposure taught investigative reporters across the country a plain lesson. A rich subject can lose the legal argument and still make scrutiny ruinously expensive. The dispute therefore outgrew the two men. It became a case study in the economics of press freedom.
The hometown paper
National observers often assume that local newspapers hold the advantage, because they know their ground better than any visiting correspondent. The assumption holds often enough. Local reporters carry the personalities, the histories, and the institutional memory that outsiders lack. Yet the local paper also labors under a pressure the national outlet escapes. Its investigative target may be its largest advertiser, the city’s largest employer, and the region’s most courted civic leader at the same time. Wynn occupied that exact position. Wynn Resorts stood as a pillar of the local economy, and any sustained fight with him carried risk that ran past a single article.
That pressure became visible in 2018, when the Las Vegas Review-Journaldisclosed that it had killed its own Wynn investigation twenty years earlier. In 1998 the reporter Carri Geer had drawn on a 1997 federal lawsuit by eleven cocktail waitresses against the Mirage, where Wynn served as chairman. The women described a culture of harassment, said they had been told to accommodate high rollers, and one server said Wynn had pressured her for sex. The paper paid for two of the women to take polygraph tests. After Wynn’s lawyers met with the paper’s leadership, the Review-Journal’s attorney edited out the central allegations, and editors ordered Geer to delete the story from the newspaper’s computers. She saved a printout, the court documents, and the polygraph results, and she kept them for twenty years. When the paper finally told the story in February 2018, the editor and publisher from that era said they could not recall the details. The Mirage had settled the waitresses’ suits by 2003.
The disclosure turned the spotlight from Wynn’s conduct onto the paper’s own vulnerability. Fear drove the failure, fear of a powerful local man and his lawyers, far more than any lapse of skill.
A second turn deepened the irony. In December 2015 Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021), Wynn’s chief rival on the Strip and a major Republican donor, secretly bought the Review-Journal. Smith, who had written hard about both moguls and had been sued by each, found himself barred from writing about either under the new ownership, and he left the paper in 2016. The hometown paper that had buried the Wynn story in 1998 passed, seventeen years later, into the hands of Wynn’s rival, and the reporter who had written the major critical biography of Wynn could no longer write about the men who shaped his city. Local knowledge ran deep in Las Vegas. Local independence ran shallow.
The national press
The limits of the local paper explain a pattern that runs through the whole Wynn record. Local reporters often gathered the first material. National institutions often published the decisive account. The clearest case came on January 27, 2018, when The Wall Street Journal published “Dozens of People Recount Pattern of Sexual Misconduct by Las Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn.” The Journal had interviewed dozens of current and former employees and assembled extensive documentation. The reporting changed Wynn’s position within days. He resigned as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee on the day the article appeared, and on February 6, 2018, he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Wynn Resorts.
The Journal’s advantage lay in its insulation. It commanded deep legal resources. It drew no revenue from Las Vegas advertising. It stood outside the web of local obligation that had constrained the Review-Journal in 1998. The contrast between the two kinds of newsroom runs through the Wynn story as a steady theme. The local reporter knew more. The national reporter could publish more safely. The handoff from local knowledge to national protection often decided whether a major investigation ever reached print.
McDougal came to the subject from two decades at the Los Angeles Times, where he earned a name as a muckraker, and he wrote after the corporate collapse rather than during the ascent. That difference changes the whole frame of the book. Smith investigated a ruler at his height. McDougal examined a fallen man. The later vantage let McDougal widen the lens from Las Vegas to American capitalism: the making of public myths around rich men, and the readiness of institutions to defer to wealth and success. He set Wynn in a line that runs through William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), Howard Hughes (1905-1976), and Donald Trump (b. 1946), larger-than-life men who turned private fortune into public influence. One limit drew notice from readers. Elaine Wynn, his former wife and long a force inside the company, receives little attention, though she lived and remained reachable while McDougal wrote. McDougal himself died in 2025, in a traffic collision, not long after the book reached print.
The constitutional turn
The last stage of the conflict left individual books behind and entered constitutional law. After the misconduct reporting, Wynn pressed several defamation actions, and one of them carried him to the Supreme Court. In 2018 he sued The Associated Press and the reporter Regina Garcia Cano over a story about a Las Vegas police press conference that described complaints from the 1970s. The Nevada courts dismissed the suit under the state’s anti-SLAPP statute, a law built to stop lawsuits that aim to punish protected speech, and in September 2024 the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal in Wynn v. The Associated Press.
Wynn then asked the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the 1964 decision that requires a public figure to prove actual malice, knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth, to win a defamation claim. His lawyers filed the petition on January 31, 2025, and argued that the media world of 1964 no longer exists, that anyone can publish with a few keystrokes, and that legacy outlets chase clicks with false headlines. For sixty years reporters have treated Sullivan as a principal shield of investigative work. Two justices, Clarence Thomas (b. 1948) and Neil Gorsuch (b. 1967), had signaled openness to revisiting the rule, and the Court had turned away a similar petition from the coal executive Don Blankenship in 2023. On March 24, 2025, the Court denied Wynn’s petition without comment, and the Associated Press had not even filed a response. The doctrine held.
The ambition of the attempt carries the meaning here. A dispute over one man’s reputation had grown into a bid to rewrite the law that governs how the American press reports on powerful people. Wynn lost the bid, yet the attempt marks how far a wealthy plaintiff might push.
Beneath the law and the money ran a contest over narrative. Wynn’s career rested on the production of stories. The Mirage told a story of transformation, Bellagio a story of refinement, and the fountains, the volcano, the paintings, the brand, and the celebrity appearances all carried a single vision of Las Vegas and of the man who built it. He raised buildings and also composed an account of himself, then sold it to the public. The reporters worked the same ground from the other side. They offered rival explanations for the same objects. Where the builder’s story praised the surfaces, the reporters asked how the resorts were financed and how the company was run, and they traced power instead of celebrating success. A collision followed, because both sides labored to define the same reality. One side held wealth, political reach, and lawyers. The other held reporting, publication, and credibility with readers. The struggle ran through books, investigations, suits, settlements, leaked documents, interviews, and court files, across thirty years.
The history of Wynn and the press captures a standing problem for any democracy. How can reporters scrutinize a man whose economic and political weight rivals that of the institutions meant to check him? The Wynn record answers in four bodies of work. The early business profiles praised the visionary builder. Smith’s Running Scared broke the myth and paid a heavy legal price. The 2018 investigations, led by The Wall Street Journal, together with the Review-Journal’s confession about 1998, exposed institutional failures that had stayed hidden for twenty years. McDougal’s Citizen Wynn turned the whole arc into a study of American power, wealth, and celebrity.
Taken together, the four reveal that the subject was never only Steve Wynn. The larger subject was the relationship between power and scrutiny. Wynn’s empire produced luxury resorts, landmarks, and a vast fortune. It also produced lawsuits, suppressed stories, a confidential settlement, a constitutional petition, and some of the strongest journalism ever written about Las Vegas. The record shows that press freedom rests on more than legal doctrine. It rests on institutions ready to absorb financial pressure, on reporters ready to risk a suit, and on publishers ready to face a powerful man. The story of Steve Wynn and the journalists who covered him reaches past the history of Las Vegas into the history of the American press.
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Smith built his reputation on a method that runs against the literary tradition of writing about Las Vegas. Where Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) rendered the city as hallucination and Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) treated it as a theater of American excess, Smith treats it as a workplace. He grounds his reporting in courthouses, city halls, casino back offices, sheriff’s substations, and neighborhood bars. He asks who holds power, how the man acquired it, and what follows from his choices. That orientation pushed him toward biography, and across more than a dozen books he has assembled a social history of the state told through the lives of the men and women who built it, governed it, gamed it, and survived it.
His first major book remains his most contested. Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn appeared in 1995 and traced the rise of Steve Wynn (b. 1942) from Golden Nugget operator to the developer behind the Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio. Smith examined the convergence of finance, real-estate speculation, regulatory politics, and old organized-crime allegations that reshaped the Strip. He also reported on a confidential Scotland Yard assessment that complicated Wynn’s effort to open a casino in London. Wynn sued the original publisher and forced it into bankruptcy, an early sign of the legal pressure that would later define Smith’s career. The book reappeared in paperback and established him as a chronicler of Nevada’s power structure.
The Animal in Hollywood: Anthony Fiato’s Life in the Mafia extends Smith’s interest in hidden networks past the Nevada line. The book recounts the career of mob enforcer Anthony Fiato across both coasts and into the entertainment industry. Smith presents organized crime not as folklore but as a working system of intimidation, loyalty, violence, and business arrangement. The book sits beside his casino and political work because it studies the informal arrangements that operate beneath official institutions.
In 1998 Smith collected his newspaper writing in On the Boulevard: The Best of John L. Smith. The volume gathers the columns that made him the city’s most-read newspaperman and ranges across mayors, slot cheats, junket operators, and forgotten fighters. Critics praised the collection as portraiture of an entire populace rather than reportage about a gambling town. The book shows the columnist as miniaturist, a writer who could fix a life in a few hundred words.
Quicksilver: The Ted Binion Murder Case, produced with Review-Journal photographer Jeff Scheid, documents the trial that gripped Las Vegas after the death of casino heir Lonnie “Ted” Binion in 1998. Some called it overdose, some suicide, and investigators called it murder. Binion’s girlfriend Sandy Murphy and her associate Rick Tabish faced charges, and the courtroom drama that followed became a local crime of the century. Smith narrates the case while Scheid’s photographs carry much of the account, a hybrid of true-crime reporting and pictorial record.
Smith’s most ambitious biography is Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas, published in 2003. The book follows Oscar Goodman (b. 1939), who spent more than three decades as the country’s foremost criminal-defense attorney for reputed organized-crime figures, his client list running from Meyer Lansky to Anthony Spilotro and Frank Rosenthal. Goodman then won election as mayor of Las Vegas. Through one man Smith maps the city’s passage from mob influence to corporate governance, and he weighs the question Goodman’s career always raised: how a lawyer mingles with the underworld for decades without joining it.
Sharks in the Desert: The Fine Art of Liquidating Your Competition, from 2005, traces the gaming racket’s evolution from mob-run vice to corporate enterprise through the biographies of the men who drove the change. A short passage on casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021) triggered a long libel suit. The disputed material covered a small part of the book, yet the litigation imposed heavy costs and contributed to Smith’s decision to seek bankruptcy protection. Press-freedom advocates cited his case in their push to strengthen Nevada’s anti-SLAPP statute, and the episode turned a local columnist into a national example of how concentrated wealth can use legal expense against a reporter.
In Bluegrass Days, Neon Nights: High Rolling With Happy Chandler’s Wayward Son, Dan Chandler, published in 2010, Smith narrates the life of Las Vegas casino host Dan Chandler, son of former Kentucky governor and baseball commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler (1898-1991). Dan grew up in the Governor’s Mansion, arrived in Las Vegas as the mob era faded, and made his name at Caesars Palace among high rollers and entertainers from Frank Sinatra to Willie Nelson. The book reads as the memoir of a vanishing Vegas character, told in his own cadence.
No Limit: The Rise and Fall of Bob Stupak and Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Tower studies Bob Stupak (1942-2009), the self-styled “Polish Maverick” who turned a small slot joint into the high-volume Vegas World through outrageous promotion and media manipulation. His VIP Vacation campaign drew tourists and regulatory sanction alike, and the seed money funded early construction of the Stratosphere Tower. The tower rose on heavy debt and steep interest, and the no-lose proposition became a high-profile failure. Stupak stands as a transitional figure, an entrepreneur between the mob-connected city and the corporate metropolis.
Smith also writes fiction and verse. Even a Street Dog: Las Vegas Stories, from 2014, presents short fiction narrated by Jasper Lamar Crabbe, a cagey survivor who guides the reader through a harder, older Las Vegas beneath the one the Travel Channel sells. The stories work at street level, the product of a writer who left real shoe leather on those sidewalks. Card Trick: Poems, published in 2018, collects seventeen love poems set in Tonopah, on Mount Charleston, and along the desert roads familiar to his column readers, a turn toward the lyric that widened his range.
His most personal book is Amelia’s Long Journey: Stories about a brave girl and her fight against cancer, also from 2018. Smith and his late wife Tricia gained custody of their adopted daughter, and the columns gathered here record Amelia’s early years, her chronic illness, the diagnosis of a brain tumor, and the long course of surgery, treatment, relapse, and recovery. Many readers who first knew Smith through scandal or casino investigation came to regard this writing as his finest. The hard-edged investigator becomes a chronicler of caregiving and grief.
The Westside Slugger: Joe Neal’s Lifelong Fight for Social Justice, published in 2019 in the Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in Nevada History, tells the story of Joe Neal (1935-2020), the first African American to serve in the Nevada State Senate. Neal rose from Mound, Louisiana, during the Depression, joined the Air Force, helped register the first Black voters in Madison Parish, and moved to southern Nevada in 1963. For more than thirty years he spoke for the powerless against sheriffs, governors, and casino titans, and he pushed reforms in hotel fire safety, public education, and the protection of Lake Tahoe. The book doubles as a civil-rights history of Las Vegas.
Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens: The Endless War over the West’s Public Lands, from 2021, places the 2014 armed standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and federal agents within the longer Sagebrush Rebellion and the century-old struggle over federal land. Smith reports true believers on both sides and traces the political and financial interests that shape the fight. He follows the violence that trailed the standoff, the murder of two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian, and the later occupation of the Malheur refuge in Oregon. The book argues that the latest range war carries national stakes for the future of public land.
Smith’s recent collaboration, My Life in Nevada Politics: The Memoirs of Richard H. Bryan, appeared in 2024 from the University of Nevada Press. Written with Richard H. Bryan (b. 1937), the book follows Bryan from a Las Vegas boyhood to county public defender, state legislator, attorney general, governor, and United States senator. Bryan led the early fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository and authored the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act. The memoir offers a practitioner’s account of state politics across decades of change.
Late in his career Smith turned to younger readers with the Fields of Silver and Gold series, biographies that recover the West through individual lives. Sarah Winnemucca: A Princess for the People, from 2020, profiles the Northern Paiute advocate, writer, and interpreter Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891), honored today by a statue in the United States Capitol. Snowshoe Thompson: Sierra Mailman, also 2020, follows the Norwegian-born carrier Snowshoe Thompson (1827-1876) who crossed the Sierra on skis of his own design to deliver mail and who helped found California skiing. Anne Martin: The March for Suffrage, published in 2021, recovers the suffragist and scholar Anne Martin (1875-1951), the first woman to run for the United States Senate. Ben Palmer: Black Pioneers on the Frontier, from the same year, tells of the formerly enslaved rancher who became a respected Nevada statesman, the first Black man to sit on a United States District Court jury in the state. The Pony Express: True Tales and Frontier Legends and Pioneering Medicine: From Sage to Surgery, both from 2022, treat the short-lived mail relay and the early healers of the West, from trained physicians such as Eliza Cook to shamans, midwives, and traditional practitioners.
Smith belongs to the last generation of metropolitan columnists who joined investigative reporting, local historical memory, and daily civic commentary in a single public role. As newspaper ownership concentrated and local journalism fractured, his career came to stand for a model of public life now in retreat. The defining institutional fight of that career came in 2015 and 2016, when interests tied to Sheldon Adelson secretly bought the Review-Journal. Smith and several colleagues helped uncover the new ownership. When management barred him from writing about Adelson and Wynn, the two men he had reported on for decades, he resigned, and the resignation drew national attention as a case study in the economics of modern journalism.
Taken together, his books form a biography of Nevada told through its people. Steve Wynn carries corporate power, Bob Stupak entrepreneurial nerve, Oscar Goodman the city’s relation to the mob, Ralph Lamb its law enforcement, Anthony Fiato the underworld beneath official institutions, Joe Neal its civil-rights struggle, and Richard Bryan its electoral mainstream. The frontier figures of the Fields of Silver and Gold series reach back to the inheritance that made the rest possible. Few journalists have documented a single state’s political, criminal, economic, and cultural history with comparable breadth. Smith’s achievement rests less in any one column than in the cumulative portrait of a place where money, ambition, crime, and reinvention met at unusual speed, and in the record he leaves of the people who lived there.
The Sediment of One Man: John L. Smith and the Tacit
Most writers who reach for tacit knowledge reach for Polanyi and stop at the slogan: we know more than we can tell. Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) starts from suspicion. In The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions he goes after the assumption that tacit knowledge is a shared thing, a common deposit held by a group and handed from one member to the next. He denies that practices are collective objects with contents we all download. When two people act alike, Turner says, they got there by separate roads. Each built his habits through his own history of exposure, trial, and correction. The sameness is achieved through feedback, not inheritance. Tacit knowledge, on this account, is individual. It is the residue of a particular life.
John L. Smith is a case the frame fits, and fits with an edge most readers miss. His authority over Las Vegas rests on knowledge no manual holds. He knows the courthouse clerks, the casino hosts, the substation gossip, the families that connect across forty years of the city’s history. The easy reading calls this the city’s tacit knowledge, lodged in a native son who carries it for the rest of us. Turner blocks that reading. What Smith holds is not the city’s deposit. It is Smith’s own habituation, the sediment of one man’s decades of contact and correction. Fourth-generation memory and thirty years on the beat did not load a shared file into him. They tuned him. No one else carries the same tuning because no one else walked the same road.
That is why the knowledge resists codification. Turner’s claim, sharpened in Understanding the Tacit, grounds the tacit in individual habituation and the slow neural tuning that experience lays down. The knowing has no portable form. You cannot write it out and hand it to a successor. Ask Smith how he knows a source is lying, or which official to call when a story breaks, and the explanation thins to nothing useful. He knows more than he can tell, and what he cannot tell did not come from a guild he might re-enroll a new man into. It came from his own causal history, and it stays there.
Now the institutional story falls into place. When interests tied to Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021) bought the Review-Journal and barred Smith from writing about Adelson and Steve Wynn (b. 1942), they treated the column as a slot. A slot takes any competent writer. On Turner’s reading the error sits in the premise. Owners look for a shared body of skill they can transfer or replace, and the tacit is not that body. They could hire a man with the title. They could not hire the habituation. The corporate newsroom cannot see the asset because the asset keeps no form on a balance sheet and has no life apart from the person. To the new owner Smith’s judgment looked like opinion, or local color, or attitude. It never looked like knowledge, because the outsider lacks the tuning that lets him recognize the knowledge as knowledge. He priced it at zero. The libel exposure from Sharks in the Desert and the long Adelson suit only deepened the blindness. The institution saw legal cost. It did not see the knowing that drew the cost.
So the death of the metropolitan columnist reads as the liquidation of an expertise the newsroom cannot reproduce, and Turner explains why nothing remains to inherit. If tacit knowledge were a shared deposit, an institution might bank it, train it, pass it down through apprenticeship. It is not a deposit. It dies with the role and with the man. Each columnist of Smith’s kind was a singular accretion built over decades of walking the same streets. End the role, and the accretion ends with him. There is no estate to settle, no library to transfer, only the bare title for the next hire to fill with a tuning he does not have and cannot acquire on the schedule a quarterly budget allows.
Smith does codify. He writes books, and the books are explicit. Running Scared and Of Rats and Men put facts about Wynn and Oscar Goodman (b. 1939) on the page where anyone can read them. Does the writing not transmit the tacit after all? Turner’s answer holds the line. The books are products of the tuning, not the tuning. Running Scared exists because Smith knew where to look, knew whom to press, knew which silence carried weight. The book does not pass along the knowing-where-to-look. A reader closes Of Rats and Men with an account of Oscar Goodman, not with Smith’s nose for the next story. The output travels. The capacity stays put. That gap is the argument in one line.
What the lens yields, then, is a single premise that carries the whole case. The tacit is individual, the sediment of one history, and it cannot be banked. From that one claim follow the non-transferability of Smith’s craft, the owner’s blindness to its value, and the finality of its loss when the role ends. Smith was the asset and the archive at once. When the paper stopped paying him to walk the desert, the asset stopped accruing. The books remain on the shelf. The man who might have written the next ones does not come back to the desk, and the knowledge that would have filled them goes with him.
Allies and Rivals in the Desert: John L. Smith Through Alliance Theory
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton argue in their paper that political belief systems come not from abstract values but from alliance structures. People pick allies by similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, and then defend those allies with a set of propagandistic biases: perpetrator biases that rationalize an ally’s wrongdoing, victim biases that embellish an ally’s grievance, attributional biases that credit an ally’s success to character and blame his failure on circumstance. Moral language, on this account, masks loyalty. The strange bedfellows of the title are the incompatible principles a coalition ends up holding once it gathers enough allies. Turn this lens on John L. Smith (b. 1960) and his subjects, and the city he covered for forty years stops looking like a place of values and starts looking like an alliance structure laid bare. Smith already worked this way. He set stated principle aside and mapped who stood with whom.
His columns and books are alliance maps. He asks who holds power and whom that power depends on. The Las Vegas he documents is a network of casino owners, sheriffs, politicians, defense lawyers, and union men bound less by shared ideals than by interdependence, the cue Pinsof and his coauthors place at the center of alliance formation. Each party reliably supplies the others. The casino needs the license, the sheriff needs the campaign money, the politician needs the donor, the lawyer needs the client. Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas traces this interdependence through one man. Oscar Goodman (b. 1939)‘s bond with his clients was not a meeting of values. It was a supply of benefits in both directions, and it held for decades.
The three kinds of alliance the paper borrows from primatology fit Smith’s cast. Conservative alliances form among high-status players to hold rank, and Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn sit there, the corporate gaming establishment guarding its position. Revolutionary alliances form among lower-status players to climb, and Bob Stupak, the outsider promoter who willed the Stratosphere into the skyline, belongs to that group, as does Joe Neal, who built a Black political coalition against the white Nevada power structure in The Westside Slugger. Bridging alliances join high and low, and Goodman is the purest example Smith ever found, the lawyer who linked the underworld to city hall and then governed from the second while drawing his history from the first. The bridging figure recurs across the whole body of work.
What holds these alliances together is interdependence, not creed, and the mob-to-corporate passage Smith chronicles reads as a realignment of the structure rather than a change of heart. Sharks in the Desert follows the gaming racket from mob vice to corporate enterprise. The industry rebranded gambling as gaming and told a story of cleaned-up legitimacy. That story is perpetrator-bias propaganda in the paper’s exact sense: downplay the origins, embellish the good intentions, minimize the harm. The libel suits sharpen the point. Wynn sued the original publisher of Running Scared and forced it into bankruptcy. Adelson sued over a passage in Sharks in the Desert. A perpetrator defending his reputation against an unflattering account behaves the way the theory predicts, and the propaganda travels by lawsuit when it cannot travel by press release.
The Bundy material gives the cleanest case in Smith’s corpus. Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens sets the 2014 standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy (b. 1946) and federal agents inside the longer Sagebrush Rebellion. The coalition that gathered around Bundy is a strange-bedfellows assembly: ranchers, sovereign citizens, militia, anti-government activists, far-right county officials. No coherent philosophy unites them. A shared rival unites them, the federal government, joined to a historical accident, the long fight over western land. The coalition runs on transitivity, the enemy of my enemy. It holds incompatible principles at once, which the paper treats as the signature of any alliance broad enough to matter. The grievance narrative does the rest. The rancher appears as victim of Washington overreach, and the harm gets embellished to draw third parties in, a textbook victim bias. The attribution follows the pattern Pinsof and his coauthors find among the losers of globalization, who trace their decline to outside forces rather than to themselves. Smith reports the other side running its own victim story about despoiled public land, and the result is the competitive victimhood the paper describes, each side claiming the larger wound.
The Review-Journal episode reads as an alliance move from start to finish. Interests tied to Adelson bought the paper in secret and barred Smith from writing about Adelson and Wynn. The owner shielded an ally and shielded himself, and he silenced a rival. Smith had become a rival to the ownership coalition because he would not run its perpetrator-bias propaganda. Then transitivity did its work in his favor. The press-freedom community and the anti-SLAPP reformers rallied to him, since the rival of Adelson was their friend, and Smith’s resignation hardened into a cause that mobilized support far past Nevada. Honesty about the frame requires one more step. Alliance Theory would read Smith’s own press-freedom framing as propaganda too, a victim bias that recruits allies to a cause. That is the provocation built into the theory, and it applies to the sympathetic figure as readily as to the powerful one. The lens does not grant Smith an exemption.
Smith’s city also displays the split between politics and morality that the paper draws at the end. Goodman defended his clients on the principle that they held constitutional rights like anyone else, a moral claim, yet the function of the bond was loyalty and mutual benefit. Smith saw through the moral language to the loyalty beneath it, again and again, across mayors and sheriffs and casino men. That is the central move of Alliance Theory, and Smith made it for thirty years without the vocabulary.
His Nevada has no deep pattern, which suits the theory’s account of stochastic, self-reinforcing alliances. Mob money built the city. Corporate money displaced the mob. Political money reshaped the press. Each shift grew from small advantages that fed on themselves and snowballed, not from any logic of values working itself out. The passage from mob to corporate gaming parallels the partisan realignments the paper lays out, contingent rather than inevitable, an accident that hardened into structure and then looked permanent to those living inside it.
The frame strains in places, and the strain is worth marking. Alliance Theory was built for mass partisan belief systems, and its evidence is survey data about liberals and conservatives. Smith’s material is elite power networks and named individuals, so the transfer runs by analogy rather than by direct fit. The paper explains the contents of belief, while much of Smith’s subject is action and money. The enforcement career in The Animal in Hollywood: Anthony Fiato’s Life in the Mafia turns on force, not propaganda, and there the word alliance still applies but belief system falls away. The theory’s claim that both partisan sides carry symmetrical biases has no clean analogue in a story about particular men chasing particular fortunes. The lens lights up the Bundy coalition and the gaming-legitimacy narrative best, because those are belief systems doing strategic work. It lights up the back-room enforcement least, because that is leverage, not rhetoric.
Read through Alliance Theory, then, Smith’s forty years gather into a single argument the paper would endorse. The city runs on loyalty and interdependence. The moral language is cover. The coalitions are accidents that set into structure. Smith never reached for the term. He walked the streets, asked who stood with whom, and wrote down the answer.
Value to a Community: John L. Smith Through Larry McEnerney
Larry McEnerney, in his talk “The Craft of Writing Effectively,” separates two things most writers run together. One is writing that shows you understand a subject, the kind school rewards and teachers are paid to read. The other is writing valuable to a community of readers, the kind the world rewards and no one is paid to read. Value is the only test that survives outside the classroom. A text earns its keep when it changes what its readers think, when it hands a particular community something the community needs and cannot get elsewhere. The reader decides, reading fast and reading skeptical, and drops anything that fails to pay him back for the time. Effort counts for nothing. Knowledge counts for nothing on its own. Elegance counts for nothing. Run this account on John L. Smith (b. 1960) and his career explains itself. He told Las Vegas things about its own power structure that changed how the city understood itself.
The community he wrote for was never a national literary audience. It was the people who lived inside the structure he described and the people who watched it work: gamblers, hosts, sheriffs, lawyers, developers, and ordinary residents who wanted to know who ran their town. They carried a shared model of the place. Smith’s worth lay in moving that model, in adjusting what his readers took to be true about the city they lived in.
He named who held power and how the power operated. He showed how Steve Wynn (b. 1942) built and wielded his empire, who Oscar Goodman (b. 1939) had been before he reached city hall, where the gaming industry came from before it called itself an industry. Running Scared, Of Rats and Men, and Sharks in the Desert each shifted the community’s picture of its own leadership. A reader closed one of them holding a different account of the city than he held before. That change is value in McEnerney’s sense, and it is the whole of it.
McEnerney teaches that valuable writing finds an instability in what a community takes as settled and goes to work on it. The words that signal value to expert readers are the words that mark tension: however, but, although, anomaly. Smith’s investigative posture lives in that gap, the space between the city’s official picture of itself and its actual arrangements. Every exposé is a “but the truth runs otherwise” set against the settled image. The reader who already suspected a gap came to Smith to have it named and filled.
He earned the skeptical reader’s attention by delivering, column after column, for decades. More than two thousand of them ran in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers came to the byline because the byline paid them back. They trusted the column to tell them something about their world they could not learn from the press releases, the casino marketing, or the official record. That trust is the reputation a writer builds when his readers keep finding value and stop checking whether the next piece will hold it.
Every community has a code, McEnerney says, a set of words and references that mark a text as valuable to that community and invisible or worthless to outsiders. Smith mastered the local code. He knew the names, the rooms, the courthouse procedure, the floor vocabulary of the casinos. That fluency marked his writing as valuable to the people who lived in the structure rather than to a literary readership somewhere else. Set him beside Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and the contrast turns on community, not talent. Thompson and Wolfe wrote for a national readership that prized voice and spectacle. Smith wrote for the readership that lived inside the machine and prized accurate information about itself. Different communities reward different things, and a text valuable to one can be worthless to the other.
This is why the prose was never the point. McEnerney holds value and craft apart, and Smith’s plain style fits the separation. The worth rode on the information, on the changed model, on the gap closed. A more decorated stylist might have produced a more admired column and a less valuable one for that readership. The value was the information, delivered to readers who could not get it elsewhere and whose understanding of the town moved because of it.
The collapse follows from the same logic. When interests tied to Sheldon Adelson bought the paper and barred Smith from writing about Adelson and Wynn, they cut his access to the instabilities the community most needed resolved, the men at the dead center of the structure. McEnerney’s frame predicts what came next. A text can keep all its craft and turn worthless, because value sits in the reader’s need and the problem addressed, never in the writer’s skill. Severed from the valuable subjects, Smith’s column kept its competence and lost its function. So he left. Without the subjects that carried the value, the writing had nothing left to do.
The wider decline reads the same way. Value in this frame depends on a community that shares a model the writing can change. As the local readership fragmented and the paper passed into new hands, the single readership whose picture Smith could move began to dissolve. No shared model, nothing to add to it. The end of the metropolitan columnist appears here as the loss of the community that made the writing valuable, not as the loss of a craft. The craft was never the asset.
The frame has a limit. McEnerney built it for academic and professional writing aimed at communities that solve recognized problems, and Smith’s readership was a civic public, not a guild. Not all of that public read for value in the strict sense. The columns on his daughter Amelia in Amelia’s Long Journey, and the obituaries that let readers smell the old arenas, created a worth closer to communion than to problem-solving, and the value-to-a-community model captures that poorly. The lens lights up the power-structure work and dims on the elegiac work. McEnerney also writes to instruct living writers, so applied to Smith after the fact it describes more than it prescribes. That fits, and it should be named.
Smith’s worth was never his prose and never his labor. It was the value he carried to a community that could not get it anywhere else, the corrected model of a city’s power. When ownership cut him from the subjects that held the value, the worth left with them, however well he still wrote.
Posted inJournalism, Las Vegas|Comments Off on The Workplace City: John L. Smith and the Lives Behind Las Vegas
Peter Berg (b. 1964) works as a director, producer, writer, and actor. His films and television share a subject. He studies how organizations function under pressure, what happens when systems fail, and why some men keep doing their jobs while the structures around them break. Sports dramas, war films, disaster pictures, police stories, documentaries, and historical epics all carry the same concern. Across two decades he has built a body of work about operational competence and institutional crisis in American popular culture.
Berg cares about collective action. His protagonists belong to football teams, military units, police departments, hospitals, drilling crews, and frontier settlements. The drama comes from the labor of holding cooperation together amid danger and doubt. A man learns less about himself than about the limits of the system he serves.
He was born in New York City on March 11, 1964. He attended The Taft School, then Macalester College, where he studied theater. His path into Hollywood ran through acting rather than film school. Through the late 1980s and 1990s he built a working career on screen. He appeared in The Last Seduction (1994), The Great White Hype (1996), and Cop Land (1997), and he reached a national audience on the television series Chicago Hope as Dr. Billy Kronk.
That training shaped how he directs. Berg learned the craft from inside the performance. His method favors spontaneity, physical presence, and quick emotional response over formal control. Actors describe loose sets. He stays near the camera while a scene runs, calling out new lines and adjustments instead of stopping to reset. He wants the reaction, not the rehearsal.
His camera follows that aim. Berg likes handheld work, available light, and loose blocking. He lets actors move through a space the way men move through a room, and the camera chases them. The look reads like observed life. Immediacy has become his signature.
Berg directed his first feature, Very Bad Things, in 1998. A bachelor party turns to disaster, and a group of friends destroys itself trying to contain the consequences. Critics split on the film. It announced his lasting interest in a group that fails to manage its own mistake. He followed it with The Rundown (2003), an action picture that showed his ease inside studio genre work.
His breakthrough came with Friday Night Lights (2004), adapted from H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s (b. 1954) book Friday Night Lights about high school football in Odessa, Texas. The film treats football as a civic institution. A whole town organizes its hopes, fears, and rankings around a team. The boys on the field carry the weight of an adult community that has nothing larger to organize itself around.
The film led to the television series of the same name, which ran from 2006 to 2011. Berg developed it and guided its creative course. The show earned wide praise. Its importance runs past the reviews.
The production changed television realism. Berg ran three cameras and told the operators to work like documentary crews. They hunted for moments and reacted to the actors instead of waiting for marks and cues. The result moved with a freedom that scripted television rarely had, and later series borrowed the approach. The show also left a mark on the business. Weak ratings put it near cancellation despite strong reviews. Berg and his partners arranged for DirecTV to air new episodes first, before they reached NBC. The deal kept the show alive, and it pointed toward the split-window and streaming models that arrived later. Berg shaped both the look of prestige television and a piece of its economics.
After Friday Night Lights, Berg turned toward institutions under fire. The Kingdom (2007) sends American investigators into Saudi Arabia after a terrorist attack, and the film runs on procedure and tactical cooperation. Hancock (2008) and Battleship (2012) put him inside large studio spectacle, though neither moved him off his core subject. Even a blockbuster gave him command structures and crews to study.
His strongest run came from true stories. Lone Survivor (2013) adapts Marcus Luttrell’s (b. 1975) memoir Lone Survivor about a Navy SEAL mission gone wrong. The film honors endurance, loyalty, and sacrifice inside an elite unit, and Berg’s care for procedure marks his view of competence as a virtue. Deepwater Horizon (2016) reconstructs the BP oil rig explosion. Patriots Day (2016) rebuilds the response to the Boston Marathon bombing. The three films form a study of institutional crisis. The heroes work as engineers, rig hands, police, and first responders who meet danger as it comes.
A partnership with Mark Wahlberg (b. 1971) runs through this period. They worked together on Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day, Mile 22 (2018), and Spenser Confidential (2020). Wahlberg gives Berg his frontline practitioner. These men hold practical knowledge rather than abstract expertise, and they read a system from the floor rather than the executive suite. Through Wahlberg, Berg returns to the gap between the men who manage an institution and the men who carry its work. Leaders err. Policy fails. The worker, the soldier, the coach, the investigator handles what follows. That choice carries Berg’s moral view. Competence sits closer to the floor than to the strategy table. The man who does the work often understands the situation better than the man who runs it.
Berg also built a production house. Under the umbrella he calls Film Forties, he runs Film 44 for scripted films and television, Film 45 for documentaries and unscripted work, and further banners for branded and commercial projects. Through these he has directed advertising for Ford, Verizon, and the National Football League, and the spots carry his feature style: handheld cameras, textured light, close attention to labor. His documentaries hold the same interest. On Freddie Roach (2012) studies a boxing trainer. Boys in Blue (2023) follows a Minneapolis high school football program coached by city police officers. Boxing, policing, football, soldiering: Berg keeps returning to communities built around hard professions and shared discipline.
Lately he has carried that realism into history and into present scandal. Painkiller (2023), a Netflix limited series, dramatizes the origins of the opioid epidemic and the Sackler family’s grip on Purdue Pharma. American Primeval (2025), also for Netflix, sets its story in 1857 during the Utah War and around the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Working from a script by Mark L. Smith, Berg drops a mother and son into a frontier of competing authorities, ethnic war, and broken sovereignty, and he refuses the romance of westward settlement. The series extends his subject into the formation of the state. He is now adapting another Bissinger book, The Mosquito Bowl, a World War II story, with Brian Grazer (b. 1951).
Set against the larger field, Berg’s career reads as a sustained study of institutional realism. His interests touch those of Howard Hawks (1896–1977), Clint Eastwood (b. 1930), and Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951), all drawn to professional competence under hard conditions. His mix of documentary texture and procedural storytelling sets him apart from them.
His method has a cost, and the cost grows from the same root as his strength. Berg shows how a crisis unfolds and how practitioners meet it. He shows less of the conditions that produce the crisis. Deepwater Horizon stays with the men on the rig more than with the economics and regulation that set the explosion in motion. Patriots Day follows the manhunt more than the sources of the terror. The Kingdom favors the investigation over the long history of American power in the region. Berg trains his camera on the men who must act. He spends less attention on the forces and the causes that shape the ground they stand on. Admirers read him as a chronicler of duty and courage. Critics read the same films as procedure that hides the question of power.
Across genres, Berg has built a coherent study of collective action in American film and television. Trust, competence, solidarity, and survival hold the work together. A Texas football team, a SEAL platoon, a drilling crew, a Boston police force, a wagon train of settlers: each faces the same test. Men try to keep cooperating while the structures around them fail. That question gives Berg’s work its unity and explains his place in modern American film and television.
They meet on the same ground now. American Primeval landed as Netflix’s answer to Taylor Sheridan’sYellowstone, and the critics who disliked it reached for the comparison first. Both men work the violent American frontier, real or mythic, and both sell it to an audience the prestige press underrates. Start there, then watch them split.
The surface rhymes. Sheridan came up as an actor, like Peter Berg, and turned to writing and directing when the acting work thinned. Both build male worlds organized around competence, danger, loyalty, and a code. Both moved from feature film into prestige television and turned a personal style into a production empire backed by a studio first-look deal. Both draw the charge of jingoism from coastal critics while filling seats in the rest of the country. On a marquee they look like cousins.
The deepest difference is authorship, and it runs through everything else. Sheridan owns the page. He wrote Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River for other directors, then consolidated, and now he writes nearly every episode of his series himself, a one-man room, fast and sole-credited, directing when he chooses. Berg owns the set. He works from other men’s scripts, mostly adaptations and true stories, and his signature lives in the camera and the performance, not the sentence. One controls the word. The other controls the moment in front of the lens. Sheridan is a writer who directs. Berg is a director who sometimes writes.
That divide shows on screen. Sheridan loves the speech. His characters stop and explain the code aloud, in monologues and aphorisms, and the worldview comes stated and clear. Berg distrusts the speech. He hunts for the unscripted reaction, the documentary flinch, competence shown and never narrated. Sheridan tells you what a man believes. Berg makes you watch a man work and infer it. Sheridan trusts language. Berg trusts behavior.
Their material parts the same way. Berg reconstructs events that happened. A SEAL ambush, a rig explosion, a marathon bombing, an opioid epidemic, a massacre in 1857. He answers to a record. Sheridan invents. The Duttons, the ranch, the dynasty, the mythic West carry no footnotes, and he shapes them into legend. Berg sits closer to the journalist. Sheridan sits closer to the balladeer.
The core unit differs too. Sheridan builds on blood. Family, land, inheritance, the dynasty that holds its ground against the modern world. Berg builds on trade. The platoon, the crew, the squad, the team, men bound by a job and not a surname. Sheridan’s drama asks who inherits. Berg’s asks who survives the shift.
Sheridan carries a cosmology. Land against capital, family against the state, the rancher as the last free man, the city as rot. You can chart the worldview. Berg carries a temperament instead. He admires duty and skill wherever he finds them and builds no comparable thesis about how the country should run. Critics call both right-coded. Only one of them has a system.
A truth that cuts against the macho label: Sheridan writes women into the center. Nicole Kidman (b. 1967) and Zoe Saldaña (b. 1978) run Special Ops: Lioness. Helen Mirren (b. 1945) and Faith Hill (b. 1967) hold the frontier shows, and the ranch turns on its daughter. Berg’s films stay near-monastic and male, with women at the edges. The reputations invert the record.
Output and the business split them as well. Sheridan runs a factory, half a dozen shows at once, a universe he built and does not own. Paramount keeps the franchises while he leaves for an NBCUniversal deal reported above a billion dollars, his television move beginning in 2029, free to start over with new property. Berg moves slower and lighter, one large project at a time, a hired auteur who carries his style from studio to studio without staking a dynasty.
Sheridan authors a world. Berg witnesses events. One writes the myth and tells you the creed. The other points the camera at the work and lets the creed stay quiet. They share a country and a taste for hard men under pressure.
The Set
Berg runs with operators and the men who sell them. Two worlds touch in his circle. One is Hollywood power. The other is the warrior class he courts, and he stands at the seam between them.
Start with the power. His oldest tie is Ari Emanuel (b. 1961), his roommate at Macalester and his agent, the model for Ari Gold on Entourage. Emanuel built the agency that moves the industry, and Berg has stood inside that machine for four decades. Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment sit close, back to Friday Night Lights and forward to The Mosquito Bowl, where Ari’s son Ezra Emanuel produces. Buzz Bissinger is blood, a second cousin, and the source of two of Berg’s films. Eric Newman runs the Netflix side with him on Painkiller and American Primeval. Sarah Aubrey partnered with him at Film 44 in the early years. Mark L. Smith writes the frontier for him. Scott Stuber kept opening doors at Netflix. This half of the set holds the money and the reach, agents and producers and studio chiefs.
Then the other half, the half he treats as sacred. Marcus Luttrell stands at the center. Berg embedded with SEAL Team Five for a month, the first civilian to do it, and he and Luttrell came out of Lone Survivor close as brothers. Through Luttrell he met the wider special-operations world, and those men learned to trust him with stories they tell no outsider. Freddie Roach (b. 1960) anchors the fight world, the subject of On Freddie Roach. The actors who play his operators belong here too, the ones who train hard and drop the vanity: Mark Wahlberg first, then Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster (b. 1980), Emile Hirsch (b. 1985), Eric Bana (b. 1968). Behind the camera the band Explosions in the Sky and the composer Steve Jablonsky (b. 1970) supply the ache. Peter Berg himself boxes and rolls jiu-jitsu, part of the Hollywood crowd that traded Pilates for punching, and the training works as a passport into the warrior half of his world.
What they value is competence you can see and courage you can test. Real knowledge lives in the body and the field, not the office. The man who has done the thing outranks the man who studied it. They prize endurance, loyalty, work without complaint, and a flat hatred of pretension. Luttrell’s praise for the cast says it cold: no divas, suit up, grab your rifle, go to work. That is the house standard.
Their hero is the man who suffers and protects. He takes the hit so others live. He gets judged by what he does under fire and by whether he holds the line for the men beside him. The dead are sacred. Berg names the fallen on screen, brings their families to premieres, and builds funds in their honor, asking the audience to mourn real men by name. The hero’s reward is to be remembered well by the brotherhood and by the country. Survival sits beside the point. That place among the honored dead and in the memory of the protected living is the immortality these films offer.
Status in the set runs on access and proof. The first currency is proximity to the real thing. To embed with a SEAL team, to earn the trust of operators who say nothing to civilians, to have Luttrell vouch for you, this buys more standing than any award. The second currency is the body. The boxer’s hands, the jiu-jitsu belt, the willingness to bleed in training, these mark a man as serious. The third is the old Hollywood scoreboard, box office and viewership and the agent’s leverage, held by Emanuel and Grazer and Stuber. A man rises here by drawing the trust of warriors and the backing of power at the same time. Berg sits where the two cross, and that crossing is his rank.
Their normative claims are claims about manhood. A man should be brave, calm, loyal, and useful. He should master a hard skill and carry weight for others. He should distrust theory and talk and trust action and craft. Below these sits an essentialist faith: courage and competence are real properties of real men, found in the field and proven in danger, and no credential stands in for them. The warrior is a type, not a costume, and the films work to tell the type from the poser.
The moral grammar is simple and old. Duty. Honor. Sacrifice. Brotherhood. The sacred dead. The world divides into those who protect and those who prey, and between them stand the protected, who owe the protectors a debt. The men who act hold the high ground. The men who manage, theorize, or profit from a safe distance rank lower, and the films watch them with suspicion. Irony reads as close to cowardice. Grief for the fallen reads as the proper response of a serious man, never as weakness.
That is the set. Power on one side, warriors on the other, and Berg the broker who carries the warriors’ code into the power’s machine and sells it back to the country as honor.
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
