Newspaper Tycoon Must Face Antitrust Suit

Newspaper Tycoon Sheldon Adelson, must face claims that he tried to drive a rival newspaper out of business by “weaponizing” its decades-old “joint operating agreement” with his Las Vegas Review-Journal, reported Bloomberg Law.

On Tuesday, December 1, Judge Gloria M. Navarro let most of the Las Vegas Sun’s antitrust lawsuit move forward, rejecting Adelson’s argument that the cooperative arrangement between the two papers, and their sale as a “single product,” made the idea of competition between them implausible.

In “assuming” there’s “no actual economic competition,” Adelson and the Review-Journal overlooked the Sun’s “incentives to pursue editorial and news-gathering efforts that attract readers,” both to increase its potential sale value and to improve its leverage in future negotiations between them, Navarro wrote on Monday.

The Newspaper Preservation Act, which contains certain antitrust exemptions, specifically encourages “editorial competition” between papers sold together, the judge noted.

In addition to Adelson and the Review-Journal, the suit targets the newspaper’s parent company and Adelson’s son-in-law, a part-owner and executive there. It was filed last year in the US District Court for the District of Nevada, seeking, among other remedies, divestiture by Adelson, who bought the paper for US$140 million in 2015.

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