Who are the real turkeys?
Inside Liberty Watch Today - Nov. 24, 2005

This is the Penny Press' third Thanksgiving as a Las Vegas Weekly newspaper and we intend to stick with a tradition we created two years ago of naming a turkey (or turkeys) of the year.

This year's winners are a pair of self-important columnists (editors, if you will) who have wormed themselves into the local media spotlight because of circumstances we'll get to later. They not only think that they're important, but that they actually know something about, well, everything.

We write, of course, about the Las Vegas Sun's Jon Ralston and Las Vegas CityLife's Steve Sebelius.

Ralston has never worked professionally anywhere other than Nevada.

Yet, he is an all-knowing, all seeing scribe whose alleged political expertise gives him credibility at least within the realm of Greenspunland, the publishing and TV empire of which Ralston is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary.

Sebelius whose background doesn't seem to be published anywhere actually works for a real newspaper company, Stephens Media, which publishes the Las Vegas Review Journal

He was by his own admission their token liberal columnist for five years and then they found a real job for him.

Stephens Media had started when we in the business call an "alternative weekly" called the Mercury. The Mercury's job was to get its rightful share of what we in the business euphemistically call "adult" advertising, most of which was then going to CityLife, owned by Wicks Publishing. 

The way things worked, while Wicks Publishing was quite profitable, it was also eventually for sale, along with its very nice printing plant and the contract to print USA Today. (And by way of full disclosure, that plant also now does a very fine job of printing the Penny Press.) So the inevitable happened, Stephens purchased Wicks and now the search was on for a person to edit a paper kept alive with advertising that often reads, "21 yr. old beautiful busty blonde. looking for action and satisfaction. Please call Ashley. 702-xxx-xxxx" Or, "Transsexual tall, sensual. Blonde 38D, 8" functional, very versatile Holly, xxx-xxxx. Not an agency."

You guessed it.

To create the content which fills the space between ads for trannys, massage parlors, and "private dancers", they found our boy Steve. Here's a sample of his qualification to edit such a newspaper:

"To say that Bush has been a truly horrible president is now understating the matter."

"Those bastards at Boyd Gaming got away with it after all."

We can assure you that the two columns from which we plucked those two gems continue with the sort of bile-filled invective which the Review Journal would never have allowed in its pages because it has a real editor in Tom Mitchell.

In fact, Sebelius is occasionally fond of using his new found freedom to use the F word in his columns as if that highlights his education.

In point of fact, if a 15-year old spoke like Sebelius occasionally writes, we would slap the snot out of him.

But Sebelius' most arrogant screed was saved for the people who actually make the money which allows him to frolic in the fields of Las Vegas “alternative journalism” (whatever that is); his former boss Mitchell. Get a load of this:

Tom Mitchell, editor of the Review-Journal, can't fathom why his parent company, the Stephens Media Group, would publish CityLife. For that matter, Mitchell probably can't fathom why so many people fail to heed the daily anti-tax, anti-public employee, anti-public school, anti-public art, anti-PBS, anti-welfare, anti-environment, anti-liberal screeds published daily on the R-J's editorial pages, under his direction.

Mitchell (my former boss during five years as the R-J's token liberal columnist) took a swipe or two at CityLife in his Sunday column, in which he also said the 2005 Legislature was a simple exercise of "shoveling tons of cash into the insatiable maw of government," and an "expropriation of its citizens' property."

Like any really good lie, it's wrapped in the delicious flaky crust of truth. And if all you did was read the R-J, you'd probably get the idea that the insatiable maw was the end of the story.

But it's not.

The government spent your money on something. In the aggregate, we call it civilization. Of course it's hard to take seriously a column like this coming from a newspaper with an ad for ATTENTION MEN Look no further! Amanda is back in Las Vegas!! Full-Service $200 *after 5am Special $150 (xxx) xxx-xxxx" on its back page.

Just what is "Full Service" anyway?

And that's where we leave Sebelius. Hard to take seriously, but full himself, nonetheless.

Ralston, is a known quantity. He will write or talk for money. So will we all, but he seems to enjoy working for the closest thing which Las Vegas has to Pravda or the Daily Worker. And his problem is that, like Sebelius, he doesn't know near as much as he would like you to think he does. Unless you've actually covered state legislatures and city councils and county commissions in other places, you really have a very narrow view of things.

He knows how things have been done here for a while. But the media landscape is changing along with the composition of our valley. Those net 8,000 new residents who come here every month usually come from somewhere else. And they just don't know how important our Turkeys of the year are.

Which is why we find it funny how full of stuffing these two really are.

Still, this is Thanksgiving and even these guys, along with us, are part of a free press - however wrong and mean spirited they can be. Which is something we little guys should truly be thankful for.

Fred Weinberg Penny, George Harris, Liberty Watch