Harry Reid's hometown feud Tuesday, December 1, 2009 ● John Breshahan

As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid struggles to pass a health care bill in Washington and his polling numbers in Nevada continue to tank, there’s another aggravation he can’t seem to escape — the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its publisher, Sherman Frederick.

Frederick has called Reid a “political corpse,” said a visit by President Barack Obama to Nevada earlier this year “was only to try to stop Nevadans from bouncing their unpopular senior Sen. Harry Reid in 2010” and suggested that “Reid’s power so far has done more for Reid personally than it has for Nevadans as a whole.” A recent Frederick blog post openly mocked Reid’s reelection theme: “Isn’t the slogan ‘Harry Reid — independent like Nevada’ libelous as hell?”

The antipathy emanating from “the RJ,” as it’s known, which has a daily circulation of 175,000 readers and is far and away the largest newspaper in the state, is another obstacle Reid faces in trying to balance his responsibilities as Senate leader with his efforts to boost his popularity in Nevada enough to win a fifth term next year. The combative Reid, however, has not been shy about firing back, telling an RJ advertising exec at a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce meeting in August that he hoped “you go out of business.”

The uproar over those comments led to a halfhearted attempt at reconciliation between Reid and Frederick, whose newspaper did endorse Reid’s last reelection bid in 2004. “He didn’t pull a knife on me or anything,” Frederick said afterward. “He didn’t wrestle me to the ground and give me a noogie.”

But nothing changed, except that Frederick recently acknowledged changing his registration from Democrat to Republican and served as the moderator for a forum for potential GOP Senate opponents to Reid.


“It’s become very personal,” noted Jon Ralston, a former RJ political columnist who now writes for the Las Vegas Sun. Frederick “seems very committed to the defeat of Harry Reid.”

Neither Reid nor Frederick would agree to an interview for this article, but surrogates made their cases for them.

“Sen. Reid believes there’s an important role for the media to play in covering government,” said Jon Summers, a Reid spokesman. “It’s also incumbent on the media, especially on the RJ, to respect that role and provide balanced coverage.”

“We’ve noticed times when the opinions on the editorial page appear to bleed over into the news section,” Summers added, but he said Reid “would continue to work with the newspaper.”

Tom Mitchell, the RJ’s editor, rejected that accusation, saying the newspaper’s reporters and editors “do our utmost to be fair to Mr. Reid.”

During an interview last week, Mitchell said he and two other RJ reporters had just come from a 90-minute, off-the-record session with Reid at the senator’s home in Searchlight, Nev. Mitchell said Frederick “is our publisher, not our editor” and added Frederick’s views are his own, not necessarily those of everyone who works at the RJ.

“You’re not going to get me to say something bad about our publisher,” said Mitchell, and he dismissed the notion from the Reid camp that Frederick’s dislike of Reid has skewed the RJ’s coverage of the senator.

“You can ask our reporters. Neither Mr. Frederick nor I would tell anyone to skew anything” to put Reid in a bad light, insisted Mitchell.

Feuds between politicians and their hometown newspapers are not anything new. The Boston Herald, for example, used to refer to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) as “Fat Boy.” Kennedy responded by trying to push through legislation forcing Rupert Murdoch, the Herald’s owner at the time, to sell off either a Boston TV station that he owned or the Herald. Murdoch opted to sell the TV station and keep the Herald, although he later dumped the paper and repurchased the station.

After his son was trounced in a 2002 GOP primary to replace him, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) unsuccessfully introduced a provision to punish the owner of The Dallas Morning News, which had run a series of unflattering articles on his son Scott. And more recently, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), the embattled chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, accused The New York Times of being on a vendetta to get him on his ethical and financial problems.

But Reid has never had a particularly easy time with the press, either in Nevada or in Washington. In the midst of the health care debate last Saturday, he took the occasion to call out David Broder of The Washington Post for a column he didn’t like, prompting Broder to respond in an interview with POLITICO that he has been “very disappointed by what I’d call the parochialism of Sen. Reid’s approach to his job and his responsibilities.”

Reid can be a notoriously difficult interview, on occasion lapsing into curt, cryptic answers if he doesn’t like the question. He’s also notorious for holding grudges against those in the press who take what he believes are “cheap shots.”

Reid’s off-the-cuff style in dealing with reporters has cost him politically as well. In early 2007, Reid declared the Iraq war “lost,” which led to furious counterattacks from the Bush White House and GOP congressional leaders. With Reid’s poll numbers down, the majority leader’s aides have tightly scripted his press appearances in recent months.

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