A Connecticut newspaperman resigned Thursday after the publisher of his newspaper was accused of adding plagiarized content into the paper and acting as a spokesman for Sheldon Adelson, newly minted owner of Nevada’s largest paper.
Steve Collins, who has covered Bristol for various outlets since 1994, announced his resignation from The Bristol Press via an open letter on Facebook. He said he was quitting because his paper’s publisher Michael Schroeder (pictured above) was caught using the name of a fake reporter to allegedly strong arm a story in the Connecticut paper that condemned the rulings against Adelson by a Nevada judge. Schroder has refused to comment to multiple outlets that reported on the alleged plagiarism.
Bringing additional attention to Collins’ resignation is that Schroeder is the manager of the company that recently purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal, of which Adelson’s family is the main investors. Adelson’s involvement in the purchase of the largest newspaper in Nevada — an early primary state — prompted a host of ethical complaints because of Adelson’s known political ties and because the overall secrecy with which the purchase is carried out.
Collins said Schroeder was “guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.”
From his open letter:
I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it. He handed it to a page designer who doesn’t know anything about journalism late one night and told him to shovel it into the pages of the paper. I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it. Yet when enterprising reporters asked my boss about it, he claimed to know nothing or told them he had no comment. Yesterday, they blew the lid off this idiocy completely, proving that Mr. Schroeder lied, that he submitted a plagiarized story, bypassed what editing exists and basically used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas. In sum, the owner of my paper is guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.
