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David Perry

High Point paper downplays Vegas threat

As the Las Vegas Market got under way last week, with huge crowds descending on the World Market Center’s growing complex of buildings, the local paper in High Point, N.C., came to a startling conclusion.

“Threat of Vegas market diminishes” was the headline on the Page 1 story, which seemed determined to assure High Pointers that they need not worry about what was about to happen in Las Vegas.

What happened in Las Vegas last week, as the thousands of us who were there can attest, was a market that brimmed with buyers, enthusiasm and energy. It was, by any measure, a major success. And it was a market that clearly upped the ante in the battle between High Point and Las Vegas for market supremacy.

But The High Point Enterprise declared, just as all that excitement in Las Vegas was about to begin, that the Vegas threat was diminishing. That was wishful thinking. It was also journalistically irresponsible.

The Enterprise story quoted exactly one person, High Point Market Authority president Brian Casey. He downplayed the significance of the opening of the World Market Center’s building B – “I’ll maybe stay for that for 10 minutes,” the Enterprise quoted him as saying. But Casey himself did not say in the story that the Vegas threat is diminishing. No one did. The headline states as fact something that is not a fact. And it wasn’t supported by the flimsy story.

It has become clear to me that the Enterprise wants to put a happy face on what is in reality a big challenge to High Point. I don’t know who the Enterprise editors think they are fooling: Thousands of market-goers in Las Vegas last week know the Vegas market just grew a lot stronger.

Furthermore, the false message sent by the Enterprise makes it that much harder for High Point market leaders to convince hotels, airlines and rental car companies that they must dramatically lower their prices. The Vegas threat is real. High Point cannot afford a false sense of security.

There is a place in the Enterprise for that newspaper’s editors to share their opinions. It is the editorial page, not the front page.

Just so you know: I was an editor for the Enterprise in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We didn’t play games with the news in those days.