Michael McDonald’s “crew” had boycotted last week’s Las Vegas Tribune edition

I was told that a few people were upset with this newspaper’s pre-cover of the GOP Nevada election edition because I, as the Editor and Publisher, allowed Chuck Muth’s column to be published before the election where he expressed his opinion about Michael McDonald who was running for reelection as the Chair of the Nevada Republican Party.
Too bad! This is the Las Vegas Tribune, the only newspaper that does not censor its writers; Chuck Muth has been donating his weekly contribution for a very long time and even if many times I do not agree with his opinion, I have never censored, altered or changed one word in his columns.
Once Chuck changed his mind and supported a candidate that he previously had exposed, but I did not stop him from defending her and out of respect for him I did not write anything about her, either good or bad; not a thing.
Once a person I liked and respected was called a liar by a writer for this newspaper and my friend was very upset about it and told me not to speak to him anymore.
I asked why he got that upset and he told me that as the owner of the paper, I could have stopped that person from writing such an article, but luckily for me my friend understood that if I would have edited, corrected or censored that column, the reputation of this newspaper would have been under question.
We believe in the freedom of the press, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression. If we stopped someone who is directly or indirectly part of our team or part of our circle, we would be betraying the confidence that we have offered them and about which they could brag.
Only once have I stopped someone — he showed himself to be a piece of trash who was writing in this newspaper and using our pages for a personal vendetta — but only after numerous requests to stop what he was doing did I have to toss him out because it IS my newspaper after all and I did not appreciate what he was doing, to me, to my paper, and to my readers.
The more I told him to tone it down the more he wrote about people I knew, and I was very aware that he was not writing the truth. Once Mayor Oscar Goodman came by my office to take me to lunch and that piece of trash happened to walk in and start talking to Oscar about the same issue he was writing about in this newspaper for a very long time.
Mayor Oscar Goodman suggested that the person should call his office and set up an appointment before we left for lunch; later that week the piece of trash wrote in my newspaper that Mayor Goodman had summoned him to his office.
That is when I realized that he was distorting the truth and I decided to let him know some of the deliberate “mistakes” he had made—one was telling people that he owned the Las Vegas Tribune when he never even put one dime into the maintenance or support of this newspaper. Also, he did not even know the meaning of the word “truth.”
That week, many years ago, when I got his column I threw it in the trashcan and wrote an explanation of why I stopped it and I promised the Las Vegas Tribune readers that he was not ever going to write for this newspaper again.
Among the people he was writing bad about was the newly elected Chair of the Nevada Republican Party, Michael McDonald.
When someone told me that Michael McDonald’s “crew” had boycotted last week’s Las Vegas Tribune edition where Chuck Muth explained why he
could not support Michael McDonald this time around. Our website was mysteriously taken down and was down until Saturday. On election day,
I realized it was not a real coincidence; it was deliberately done; but by Saturday morning, just before the elections took place, two very good friends of the Las Vegas Tribune fixed the “mysterious” problem.
I was told that “Michael is upset with you” for allowing Chuck to write what he did, but Michael’s friend did not tell him that I am no longer a child and when he made three appointments to meet me at the Starbucks and was a no-show all three times without having the courtesy to cancel, because his girlfriend did not allow him to keep the meeting or even using the normal excuse of “something unexpected came up.”

I don’t care if Michael McDonald sabotaged our website or not because more than two thousand people are subscribers to our online delivery,
plus fifteen hundred more complimentary subscribers and what they do not read today they will read sometime during the week.
My name is Rolando Larraz, and as always, I approved this column.
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Rolando Larraz is Editor in Chief of the Las Vegas Tribune. His column appears weekly in this newspaper. To contact Rolando Larraz, email him
at: Rlarraz@lasvegastribune.com or at 702-272-4634.