Sunday, March 5, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.
Never send a boy to do a man's job. The result will be something childish.
There are almost 1.8 millon people living in Southern Nevada today. At the beginning of the last decade of the last century there were barely half that many people living here. Those numbers mean many different things to many different people, but to me they mean that as a Review-Journal columnist, John L. Smith had almost a million people to whom he could write his lies and they wouldn't know the difference.
That's one of the great dangers of living in the fastest growing city in the country; there is a very small base of institutional knowledge. So if those who know the truth refuse to share it, or purposely distort it, the new people who yearn for any information about the place they now call home will be victimized by the very people they want to trust to tell them the truth.
That's why the Las Vegas Sun exists.
When my father, Hank Greenspun, first published this newspaper in 1950 it was for the express purpose of giving the people in this community - all 25,000 of them - another voice. A voice of reason, a voice of responsibility and a voice of truth. For the first half of the 20th century, the Review-Journal had a monopoly on what people were told in their daily newspaper, and truth was often the first casualty in that paper's quest for political, social and economic dominance.
Fast forward to the first decade of the 21st century - that would be right now - and we have already proven the old adage, again, that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.
This time, though, the repetition of false statements in a daily newspaper is more insidious and, therefore, far more dangerous. In the old days, everyone knew everyone else and most people knew everything worth knowing. It was a very small town. Today, most people are too busy just trying to make a living and a home for themselves and their families to pay much attention to what is real and what is not in the world around them.
For that, they rely on newspapers and other media to inform. For that, they rely on people like John L. Smith and me to tell it "like it is." That is what I try to do every day in this newspaper. I used to think John also tried to do the same thing because I know how he was raised. I knew his mother very well and I know his mother taught him to tell the truth. I believe if she were here today, she would be very disappointed in him.
Let me tell you why.
Last week John climbed aboard the Review-Journal wagon in its quest to give a lie to an independent study that the Sun commissioned earlier this year that would tell us whether or not the deal that golf course developer Bill Walters is trying to do with the city of Las Vegas was a fair and reasonable one for the taxpayers of this community.
The central question we wanted answered - because it was the basis for the attorney general's decision to bypass the sheriff and district attorney of Clark County - was whether or not the terms of the deal were reasonable. Or, to the contrary, whether Walters and the city cooked up a fast one to screw the taxpayers.
The answer came back that, indeed, it was not only a good deal for the taxpayers, it was a very good deal for them.
So what did the Review-Journal do? It went on the attack, trying to prove that the study was not "independent" or that it was fatally flawed in its assumptions. After all, it was the R-J that fomented all the excitement and caused the attorney general to - how do the kids say it? - disrespect David Roger and Bill Young by ignoring their jurisdiction on this matter and snatching the case away from them and into his politically inspired hands in Carson City.
That newspaper has failed. Whatever questions it has asked about the independent study have been answered - and there has been no material change in the results. The deal was good for taxpayers.
So, here's the important part. I did not write that report, I did not tell them how to write it or what to find. In fact, I specifically told that company that I wanted an answer, whichever way it came down.
So why does John L. Smith attack me - forget me - why does Smith attack my deceased father in his column this past week? And why does he do it by trying to pass as truth a lie he knows so well that he could have told it himself almost 20 years ago.
Smith was here when a greedy taxicab company owner sued the Las Vegas Sun for libel when we went after a 30,000-gallon propane tank that sat in the middle of one of the most vulnerable parts of the city. The city fathers and mothers as well as the fire chief agreed that too many thousands of innocent people would die if that tank were to explode - as propane tanks often do - so they made the taxi company move it.
Two of the owners sued the Sun for $305 million. They used the same lies that Smith did last week - that Hank Greenspun singled out the propane tank to advance his cable television interests. And they also did it, despicably, after my father had died. The jury found, in almost record time, that not only was that so much bull, but that the Sun did a major public service for Las Vegas.
What is hard to understand is why Smith would try to sully the very good name of my father, who is no longer here to defend himself. Why would he stoop so low? Just how important is it to the Review-Journal that it try to devalue that report?
Is it really important enough for Smith to dishonor his once good name in this community?
At least when the grand defamer of all time, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, came to town with his lies about my father, he had the decency to do it to his face. McCarthy, of course, lived just long enough to regret ever coming here. My father, proudly, was the constant source of that regret.
As children we learned the shame in attacking a man when he is down or defaming him when he is gone and unable to defend himself. I am sure John L. Smith learned that lesson from his mother.
What happened John, to make you forget that sense of decency? Have you no shame?
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