In 2024 I wrote in this space about how far-away reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting about events that happened in the Las Vegas area. A team from Reuters writing about the nefarious business activities of Elon Musk described a suburban Las Vegas office of his Tesla devoted to talking Tesla buyers out of demanding better battery performance for their electric vehicles. That Reuters story is still online (click here). A follow-up at the end of my post noted that the article about the prestigious Pulitzers in the next day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal made no mention of the big story reported out under its very nose.
This year, we have a variation on this theme of no coverage. The annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced in New York on Monday. The story about the awards in the print edition of the next day’s RJ–now the country’s second largest newspaper never to have won one–made reference in some manner to 12 of the 15 journalism and special citation awards (another eight were given for arts and letters). As it happens, one of the three awards not referenced by the RJ concerned material rather unfavorable to the billionaire Adelson family, which has owned the paper since 2015.
Mark Lamster, the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, won the Criticism award for, in the words of the citation, “using wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents.” A lot of those opinions expressed heated opposition to a proposal to tear down the striking, nearly half-century-old I.M. Pei-designed Dallas City Hall and replace it with a government-subsidized basketball arena to house the Dallas Mavericks. The team is majority owned by the Adelsons, whose monied members live in Las Vegas.
As someone who worked on the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald long before becoming New To Las Vegas, I have been watching the controversy play out in Dallas, a quintessential business town. The issue pits the prosperous establishment against civic watchdogs who say claims that City Hall is falling apart have been exaggerated to support a boondoggle project to make the rich richer.
Lamster has thrown his lot with the goo-goos. From samples of his prize-winning work posted (for all to see) on the official Pulitzer Prize website:
The Mavericks don’t need a new arena; they want a new arena. Although their current home, the recently upgraded American Airlines Center, is no architectural masterpiece, it is in fine condition. The reason the team’s owners want a new home is simple: They want to control the surrounding development. In Victory Park [where the current area is located], they don’t …
There is a word for this: boondoggle. Dallas taxpayers would be paying an enormous premium – and giving up their majestic, centrally located seat of government – for the benefit of real estate interests, the building industry and the billionaire owners of the basketball team that shipped the city’s favorite son out of town in the middle of the night [Luka Dončić] and then raised ticket prices …
If the Mavs want a new arena downtown, there are numerous other potential locations, including land already being opened up by the reorientation of the convention center. (The city has yet to present a compelling vision for what will occupy this space even as it spends billions on the project.) Whatever the location, the Mavs should pay for their arena themselves, without a penny of public money …
If the Adelson-backed project in Dallas goes nowhere, Lamster’s stories may be a big reason why.
I searched the online archives of the RJ, especially the sports pages, for any past mentions of this very interesting ongoing issue in the Big D. Couldn’t find anything. Of course, what isn’t reported is often as telling as what is.