Las Vegas Stadium. Two giant California Earthquakes over 6.5 and felt in Las Vegas at a level of 3 or 4, are the largest of thousands of aftershocks, and yet the Raiders say Las Vegas Raiders Stadium wasn’t impacted? Yeah. Right.
The Las Vegas Stadium for The Oakland Raiders could have a giant series of problems come up during its construction process, and the public would never really know it. Assisted by a local media that acts like a public relations company and bears zero resemblance to a true investigative news organization, the Las Vegas Stadium Authority and the Oakland Raiders have carte blanche to attempt to shield the public from what’s really going on.
Let’s consider the facts:
1) The Las Vegas Stadium Authority has no weekly updated press area and no record of press releases – no documented attempt to use its website to inform the public about construction progress, bad news or good news. This is a direct opposite path of the Salesforce Transit Center Project in San Francisco, where the Transbay Joint Powers Authority had a web portal for news updates, which was added to on a weekly basis.
2) There have been a number of problems associated with Las Vegas Stadium, from the slow and less-than-forecast stadium hotel tax revenue, to the steel delivery delay problem and associated results, and now this earthquake impact issue. In all cases, the Las Vegas Stadium Authority did not attempt to set a press conference to officially update the media and the public and field questions.
3) The local Las Vegas media has, in many cases, bent over backwards to help the Las Vegas Stadium Authority and the Oakland Raiders in the process of not informing the public via avoiding calls for a press conference or press conference, or even Raiders video updates. The Public gets far more in video updates about the privately owned Raiders organization’s players than it does the construction of the publicly-owned Las Vegas Stadium.
In the view of this blogger, the local media’s collective behavior is reminiscent of the national media’s assist given to the Bush Administration in propping up a false set of ideas (we call it fake news now) during The Iraq War:
Major news organizations aided and abetted the Bush administration’s march to war on what turned out to be faulty premises. All too often, skepticism was checked at the door, and the shaky claims of top officials and unnamed sources were trumpeted as fact.
The Las Vegas media had better hope nothing tragically bad happens during the construction of Las Vegas Stadium that bloggers warned others about, yet were bad-mouthed by them. If that happens, those persons representing the Las Vegas media (or the national media) and publishing Las Vegas Stadium propaganda , yet trying to shut down the voices who would ask questions, should be made to spend a week in jail.
Stay tuned.