Vegas mystery solved: Sheldon Adelson buys the Review-Journal

The mystery of who owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal was solved Thursday, following a magazine report identifying casino magnate Sheldon Adelson as the buyer of Nevada’s largest newspaper, hours after Adelson denied any ownership stake in the paper.

The confusion reached even the newspaper’s leadership, where Editor Mike Hengel said in an email to The Times that “no one has confirmed [Adelson’s ownership] to us.”

But on Thursday, the same day the Review-Journal printed a lenghty story naming Adelson as the new owner, the Adelson family confirmed their ownership in a statement printed in the paper.

News + Media Capital Group, a Delaware-based corporation founded in September, purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its sister publications on Dec. 11 for $140 million.

The sale raised eyebrows for its price — far more than the $102 million paid in March for the Review-Journal and seven other daily newspapers —and because the owner of News + Media Capital Group refused to be identified.

Fortune magazine said in an article published Wednesday that Adelson was behind the paper’s purchase, citing multiple sources. “Mystery solved, but we still don’t understand why it was a big secret in the first place,” the magazine wrote.

But Adelson told Brian Stetler of CNN on Tuesday night that he had “no personal interest” in the newspaper.

Adelson’s wealth, prominent connections and apparent designs on a kingmaker role in the Republican Party led to speculation that he was behind the purchase.

Adelson -- one of the richest men in the world and a passionate supporter of Israel -- is routinely courted by office-seekers from the White House down, who make the pilgrimage to his business headquarters on the Las Vegas Strip to seek his blessing.

In the last presidential campaign, he and his wife, Miriam, spent about $100 million and the couple are expected to generously help whomever they endorse for president in 2016. Adelson’s Venetian resort hosted Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

The question is whether and to what degree Adelson would seek to use the Review-Journal to further promote his business and political interests.

Democratic politicians said they weren’t worried about a change in ownership at the R-J, as it’s known. The paper’s conservative bent, they said, made it a logical purchase by a rich Vegas conservative. “I don’t know who bought the newspaper for sure, but I guarantee the editorial policy couldn’t be any worse than it has been for 10 years,” Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) joked to reporters on Wednesday.

Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat who represents the Las Vegas region in Congress, said she has tried to determine who the new owner is but will not believe anything until she hears directly from the source.

“I don’t think the community can accept the information in the R-J as credible if they don’t know who’s behind it, regardless of who that might be,” Titus said. “Whoever it is needs to come out and say, ‘I own the paper.’ And if it’s not Mr. Adelson, he ought to come out and say, ‘I don’t own the paper.’”

Speculation immediately turned to the political influence that Adelson could exert in his home state, a major presidential battleground in November 2016, and host to early Democratic and Republican nominating contests as well as a highly competitive U.S. Senate race.

It is not as though Adelson is a political neophyte, or that his Republican leanings would represent a dramatic shift for the Review-Journal, which has long had a conservative editorial page and, critics say, a penchant for allowing those sentiments to bleed into its news coverage. (Conversely, critics detect a pro-Democratic bias in the paper’s much smaller rival, the Las Vegas Sun, which is owned by Brian Greenspun, a longtime friend and political supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton.)

The newspaper’s editorial board said the paper has little ground to criticize other organizations for failing to be transparent with the public.

“Does the Review-Journal have the credibility to advocate for such openness?” the editorial board wrote Wednesday. “Not so much anymore.”

Times staff writer Mark Z. Barabak contributed to this report.