OLD Media Moves

How a Wall Street law firm threatened two business journalists

William Cohan writes for Vanity Fair about how Wall Street law firm Paul Weiss threatened business journalists Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes, the coauthors of a new book, “The Caesars Palace Coup,” about their reporting for the book.

Cohan writes, “Diversion Books published The Caesars Palace Coup on March 16. In the note on sources at the end of the book, Indap and Frumes tell the story of the Paul, Weiss efforts to intimidate them, ‘to underscore the strong feelings that underlie the Caesars story’ and to ‘demonstrate how the news media continues to face undue harassment from powerful forces, like Paul, Weiss, for simply attempting to do its job.’ The authors have heard nothing from Paul, Weiss since the book was published. Naturally, I was curious about how Karp, who professes to be an advocate for our civil and constitutional rights, could have allowed Birenboim’s threatening letter to be written on Paul, Weiss letterhead. But Karp declined to comment.

“‘Intimidation and bullying can be effective tools by powerful and wealthy interests to silence underfunded news outlets and journalists,’ Frumes told me. ‘But I believe such interests—and all of us—would be served better if they spent less effort at preventing journalists from discovering and understanding the truth, and more effort at owning mistakes and vying to be better if, in the light of day, the truth turns out to be ugly.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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