ltem in dailynews about casino coverage and article

monday august 21, 2006

RE YOUR editorial "Cease-Fire Declared with State Gaming Board":

This is a joke, right?

Beyond the fact of your making light of the very destructive and terrible bloodshed that was being waged in the Middle East on a daily basis, the mainstream Philadelphia news media has been operating under an implicit "cease-fire" agreement in their reporting of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board since I have been following the gambling issue over the last several months.

The esteemed editors of the Daily News might do well to peruse the columns and Web sites of major newspapers from other regions to get some sense of how poor their own coverage of the gambling legislation has been before patting themselves on the back so heartily.

Papers and online news sites like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, centredaily.com in central Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley's Morning Call have published thousands of provocative and insightful words on the gambling issue. As journalists, your job is to report the facts about issues relevant to your readers, to reveal the motives, decisions and processes that our elected official feel content to undertake in secret out of the public eye.

Legalized gambling is probably the most significant legislation to be "passed" in decades. Your obligation is to your readership, the public, not the gaming control board.

Jeremy Beaudry, Philadelphia

and here is the editoral it is refering to...

August 17, 2006 CEASE-FIRE DECLARED WITH STATE GAMING BOARD IT DOES THE RIGHT THING IN RELEASING CASINO-OWNERSHIP INFO IF A CEASE-FIRE is good enough for the Middle East, it should be good enough for the Daily News. And so, let us mark a fragile accord between this page and the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. Earlier this week, the state board responsible for licensing and regulating the the two casinos opening in Philadelphia (and others around the state) asserted its intention to keep details of the ownerships of the casino applicants secret. The word they prefer to use is "confidential," but the stakes are too high for the citizens of this city to bicker over the niceties of language. The bottom line is that the board's insistence on keeping ownership information from the public was wrong. It represented an overly zealous interpretation of the original gambling legislation, which seemed to put the interests of the casino applicants over the rights of citizens to be fully informed about a law that will impact their lives. At issue is the complicated ownership structures of many of the casinos; four of the five Philadelphia slots applicants have local partner groups, the list for which can get quite long. For example, Foxwood's local partner is a group called Washington Philadelphia Investors L.P. That partner group lists 22 names, including Comcast Spectacor chairman Ed Snider and music producer Quincy Jones. All but Pinnacle have similar partner groups. Those names have always been accessible; the percentage stake each individual holds was being withheld. But then the gaming board reconsidered. It announced yesterday that it will in fact release the details of the ownership stakes for each of the applicants. (Story, Page 18.) The board says it will post the information of who owns what stake in each casino Monday on its Web site, www.pgcb.state.pa.us. Hence, our cease-fire. In fact, this move gets a big thumbs-up. The state board has taken its share of sniper fire from the Daily News and others over its apparent reluctance to be as transparent as possible as it navigates the complicated job of granting gambling licenses. When, for example, the state board earlier this year dragged its feet releasing each applicant's impact reports, claiming the information was proprietary, it seriously crippled access to information critical to the public input process. Then, when the Daily News contacted the applicants, all of them readily agreed to release their reports. The same was not the case when this page contacted them to see if they would release their ownership structures and stakes. Their reluctance to publish the financial stakes of their partners may be understandable; on the other hand, if you're interested in privacy, you probably shouldn't be investing in a state-regulated casino. (Full disclosure: Daily News owner Brian Tierney is a partner in the Trump Street casino). We're heartened by the board's interest in keeping information about these applicants as accessible and public as possible - especially given the moronic law on the state books that allows public officials to own up to a 1 percent stake in a casino. The idea that this could happen is bad enough. That the public could be prevented from knowing who those officials are is criminal. *