{"id":190977,"date":"2026-06-03T10:14:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T18:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=190977"},"modified":"2026-06-03T12:20:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T20:20:18","slug":"sheldon-adelson-and-the-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=190977","title":{"rendered":"Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most rich men quarrel with reporters as subjects of coverage. Sheldon Adelson (1933-2021)<\/a> did that, and then he did more. He sued reporters. He bought the newspaper that covered him. He founded a newspaper in another country<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The reporters who first took his measure wrote in a familiar key. Connie Bruck’s 2008 profile in The New Yorker<\/a>, “The Brass Ring<\/a>,” 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<\/a>, where Adelson built the gambling fortune that funded everything else<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The man the reporters met<\/strong><\/p>\n

The early business press wrote Adelson as a classic American striver. He grew up poor in Dorchester<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

What he built next changed Las Vegas. The Venetian<\/a> 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<\/a> and the Venetian Macao<\/a> turned a Portuguese backwater into the richest gambling market on earth, and Marina Bay Sands<\/a> did the same for Singapore’s tourist economy. By the late 2000s he sat among the richest men alive.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. The adversarial coverage that followed gave Adelson his reasons, or his pretexts, for the legal campaign that came to define him.<\/p>\n

Sharks in the Desert and the bankrupting of John L. Smith<\/strong><\/p>\n

The central conflict of Adelson’s life with the press centered on one Nevada columnist. John L. Smith<\/a> of the Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/a> had already written Running Scared<\/a> 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>, 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.<\/p>\n

He sued for fifteen million dollars. He filed in Los Angeles in 2005 and named both Smith and the publisher, Barricade Books<\/a>, the house of the late Lyle Stuart<\/a>. 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A pattern, not an episode<\/strong><\/p>\n

Smith was not alone. Adelson sued the Las Vegas Sun<\/a> reporter Jeff Simpson (1960-2011) twice over gaming columns. Both claims failed, and Simpson has described the weight of the litigation even so<\/a>. Adelson sued the Daily Mail<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Kate O’Keeffe<\/a> and the move across borders<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most instructive of the later suits crossed an ocean. Kate O’Keeffe<\/a> of The Wall Street Journal<\/a> 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<\/a>, O’Keeffe described Adelson as “a scrappy, foul-mouthed billionaire from working-class Dorchester, Mass<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, the deep-pocketed parent that could fund a defense.<\/p>\n

The venue was the message. American reporters enjoy unusual protection at home. Under New York Times Co. v. Sullivan<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

O’Keeffe fought back through American courts. She used the federal discovery statute, 28 U.S.C. \u00a7 1782<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The National Jewish Democratic Council<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Review-Journal taken from within<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Israel Hayom and the building of a press<\/strong><\/p>\n

The American record alone misses half of the man. To see the whole, look to Israel. In July 2007 Adelson founded Israel Hayom<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

He did not run it to make money. By one accounting reported in Haaretz<\/a>, 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<\/a>‘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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, Robert Maxwell<\/a>, and Rupert Murdoch<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The shape of the whole<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20538],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-las-vegas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=190977"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191031,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190977\/revisions\/191031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=190977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=190977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=190977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}