EDITORIAL: Ending JOA between RJ, Sun wouldn’t silence anyone

The idea that it is possible today to “silence” certain political perspectives ignores the immeasurable expansion of news and entertainment sources now available to consumers thanks to the rapid technological advances of the Internet Age.

Yet in an effort to force the Review-Journal to continue publishing the Las Vegas Sun under a joint operating arrangement, the latter makes the argument that it is the “sole alternative editorial voice” to the former and that the Review-Journal’s move to discontinue the JOA represents an effort to eliminate or censor the Sun’s point of view.

This is nonsense.

Las Vegas readers have access to a wide range of local news and opinion sources, including the 74 radio stations within listening range of the valley and the 20 TV stations that broadcast from Southern Nevada. The Nevada Independent and the Nevada Current are online publications that feature news and opinion on a daily basis. Scores of Las Vegas-based websites, blogs, magazines and alternative publications also offer consumers a wide variety of perspectives on state and local issues.

Nor would terminating the current arrangement in any way preclude the owners of the Sun from offering news and opinion content on their website or in any of their other publications. It also wouldn’t prevent them from producing, publishing and distributing their own print newspaper and marketing it to potential readers. In addition, much of what appears in the Sun was first published days earlier in The New York Times, which is available to Las Vegas news consumers online or in print fashion at various local retail outlets or via home delivery.

These are challenging times for print newspapers across the country, which are struggling to reinvent their business models to survive in a more fractured and fast-evolving media environment. At the same time, the United States is in the midst of an “information explosion” in which technology — for better or for worse — has led to an avalanche of potential sources of every conceivable angle, slant or viewpoint that Las Vegas and American consumers may tap at their leisure.

In short, ending the joint operating arrangement between the Sun and the Review-Journal — signed in 1989 and amended in 2005, before smartphones and social media ushered in tectonic shifts in the media landscape, advertising strategies and consumer behavior — would in no way “silence” any political perspectives or viewpoints.