Among the Junketeers: 90 Hours in Vegas, Selling Out Hard
LAS VEGAS — It only took 24 hours for the Stockholm Syndrome to set in. It was after the huge, boomerang-sized crab legs had been cleared away and the Wagyu beef had been consumed and all the after-dinner whiskeys had been drained and they'd ushered us past the hundreds of ordinary suckers and through the VIP entrance of the Caesar's Palace nightclub and set us up with a private table and bottle service so we could recline on a couch and watch all the drunk bachelorette party girls shake their asses at the bar in front of us, and the doorman smiled warmly at us and the attractive waitress smiled warmly at us and the PR people smiled warmly at us and we, the journalists, all smiled warmly at each other and took it all in, and I thought to myself, "Vegas, baby!" Vegas, baby. It likes me. And I like it.
The email from the PR guy came in earlier this month. "Jan 19th – 23, I am bringing sports journalists to Vegas for an all exclusive weekend. We'll take care of the flights, the meals, and the entertainment for the journalists that weekend. There will also be an opportunity to meet with the Doctors and Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Brain Institute here in Vegas and tour the facility where they are doing amazingly awesome work to understand concussions and the development of the athletes brain....But this will be a fun trip."
This won't just be about brain injuries. Try getting a bunch of journalists to fly out for that. No, this will be a party , four nights in Vegas, all expenses paid, only the finest, courtesy of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA). A working trip, of course. A classic Vegas junket. In some of the fustier precincts of journalism these things are frowned upon as, you know, corrupt, but here in the real world, this is how it's done. Publications save the cost of paying for a reporting trip. Writers get a free vacation that they could never afford, for the low low cost of a tiny bit of backscratching in print. And the City of Las Vegas gets a crop of lifelong friends in the media. "Journalists from ESPN, Esquire, LA Times, and FOX are already on board," promised the email. "So this is legit." Journalistic duty fairly demanded that I attend. To observe. To report. To junketeer.
Bellagio Room Service Menu - News
We had an entire room to ourselves. They filled the table with calamari and thinly sliced pork and every other appetizer on the menu, something which would be repeated in nearly every restaurant where we ate. The journalists had a bunch of cocktails,
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