Columnist quits after being barred from writing about owner
By Ian Whitaker, Las Vegas Sun
John L. Smith
Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith announced his resignation Tuesday, days after the newspaper’s new editor said publicly that Smith had been barred from writing about the R-J‘s new owner, Sheldon Adelson.
On Saturday, editor Keith Moyer told a meeting of the Society of Professional Journalists at UNLV that Smith would no longer be allowed to write about Adelson “as long as I’m editor,” according to an R-J reporter who tweeted details of the event. Smith had written numerous times about Adelson, including in a December 2015 R-J column following the revelation that the billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate and his family had purchased the paper.
In that column, Smith called Adelson “precisely the wrong person to own this or any newspaper.”