A Washoe County probate commissioner has denied attempts to videotape secretive court proceedings in media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s legal battle against his children, as national media outlets attempt to unseal the case.

Murdoch — the 93-year-old businessman behind the media companies that control Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other outlets in Australia and Britain — has been using a Nevada probate court to seek changes in an irrevocable trust controlling company shares and who will succeed him following his death, the New York Times reported in July.

The case is set to go to trial this month, to determine whether Murdoch is acting in good faith and for the sole benefit of heirs by seeking to change the trust, the New York Times reported. The limited information publicized about the case shows that a series of evidentiary hearings are scheduled to begin on Sept. 16.

Six national media outlets — the New York Times, CNN, The Associated Press, National Public Radio, The Washington Post and Reuters — have joined in an attempt to open proceedings to the public and access the case’s records, according to documents obtained by the Review-Journal.

In August, Probate Commissioner Edmund Gorman Jr. denied a request to videotape the proceedings from Alexander Falconi, the operator of the Our Nevada Judges media website.

The commissioner wrote that electronic coverage of the case would violate the “parties’ rights to privacy which are protected by Nevada Revised Statutes,” according to court documents obtained by the Review-Journal.

Our Nevada Judges has challenged the commissioner’s decision to prevent coverage, prompting responses from attorneys involved in the proceedings who are seeking to prevent public access. Attorneys who authored responses to the challenge do not indicate the names of their clients, and wrote that the court proceedings scheduled for this month should remain closed because they concern a trust.

“The confidential nature of these proceedings is supported by both historical precedent and current legislative intent to protect the privacy and well-being of those involved,” attorneys wrote in a response to Our Nevada Judge’s challenge. “This protection is crucial for maintaining Nevada’s status as a competitive jurisdiction for estate planning and asset protection.”

Multiple attorneys involved in the case did not respond to request for comment on Monday afternoon.

“I will continue to authorize Our Nevada Judges Inc. to participate in litigation confronting efforts by the judiciary and legislature to seal and close our courts without the strict scrutiny analysis mandated by the First Amendment,” Falconi said in an emailed statement. “The sealing of the entire file of the Murdoch trust case is egregiously excessive and an ongoing embarrassment.”

The national media outlets filed a motion last week to unseal the case. Attorney Maggie McLetchie, who is representing the media outlets, wrote that there is a large public interest in the case due to “the potential of this proceeding to determine the direction of a media empire with immense influence over the American political landscape,” according to a copy of the motion.

The only published information about the case includes “general docket information” visible on the Washoe County District Court’s website, which fails to include the names of the parties involved in the court proceedings. A status conference in the case is scheduled for Tuesday and remains closed to the public, District Court Clerk Alicia Lerud said Monday.

“Though some litigants may desire secrecy and some courts indulge this desire, this level of sealing does not pass constitutional muster,” McLetchie wrote in the motion filed on behalf of the media companies, adding that civil proceedings and records should be presumed open to the public under the First Amendment and Nevada’s constitution.

Documents filed by Our Nevada Judges and the coalition of national media outlets both reference a Nevada Supreme Court ruling in a separate case brought by Falconi, in which the high court found that the public has a constitutional right to Family Court proceedings.

McLetchie wrote in the motion that because of the Supreme Court ruling, a judge must give a reason to close a case in civil proceedings.

Attorneys opposing Our Nevada Judge’s efforts to obtain media access wrote that trust proceedings are ruled by a different state law, unrelated to the Supreme Court ruling in the prior case.

“Unlike the family law proceedings at issue in Falconi, the trust proceedings at issue here are deeply rooted in equity and were historically treated as private matters,” the attorneys wrote in court documents.

Murdoch’s trust currently divides control of the family business between his four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, the New York Times reported. But Murdoch wants to only allow Lachlan, currently the top executive at Fox Corp. and News Corp., to run the businesses, arguing in court that doing so would preserve conservative editorial standards the companies’ commercial value, according to the Times.

Attorneys for Elisabeth, Prudence and James Murdoch have argued that their father is trying to disenfranchise them, which would violate the spirit of the trust’s “equal governance provision,” the Times reported.

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240.

(Reuters) – The Biden administration on Monday said it had approved a major transmission line in Nevada that will run hundreds of miles along the state’s border with California and be able to provide power to about 5 million homes.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

The milestone is the administration’s latest effort to speed approval of major clean energy projects as part of its climate change and jobs agendas.

President Joe Biden has a goal to decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035, a feat that will require massive investments in new transmission to move clean wind and solar energy to population centers.

BY THE NUMBERS

Public utility NV Energy’s Greenlink West Transmission project will run for 472 miles from North Las Vegas to Reno, according to U.S. Bureau of Land Management documents.

Once it is built, the line could transmit up to 4 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power about 5 million homes.

NV Energy has said its Greenlink project, which includes Greenlink West and the smaller Greenlink North, will cost about $4.24 billion.

Greenlink North is in the early stages of the federal permitting process.

BLM also said it approved the 700-megawatt Libra Solar project in Mineral County, Nevada, which could provide enough power for 212,000 homes. It will be the largest solar and battery storage project in Nevada once it is constructed.

CONTEXT

Nevada is a key battleground state in the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election between Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump.

KEY QUOTE

“In Nevada and across the country, our leaps forward to efficiently permit wind, solar, transmission and other clean energy projects are part of a broader strategy to lead the world in the global clean energy race and fight against pollution — all while protecting our communities and investing in local economies,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said in a statement.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Aurora ellis)

They were once on street corners, at bus stops, in convenience stores, courthouses and casinos.

In the pre-cell phone era, everyone from executives to children to criminals used them.

But the golden age of the payphone ended many years ago as cell phones took hold, becoming ubiquitous and affordable.

Today, few remain and even fewer are in use. A recent Las Vegas Review-Journal search for payphones in the Las Vegas area found five: one at Centennial Hills Hospital, another at the Clark County detention center, two at Jerry’s Nugget and one on display at the Mob Museum.

Early history

The first time the phrase “pay phone” appeared in the Review-Journal, at least according to the digitally searchable archives, was February 12, 1931.

The story was a brief about a pay phone stolen by thieves “evidently bent upon taking from it whatever money there might be in the machine.” It ran under a photo of a remodeled gas station and next to an article about a peddler of a “narcotic weed” called “marihuana.”

The payphone’s history stretches back to 1889, when the first one was installed on a corner in Hartford, Connecticut after being invented by William Gray.

Ron Knappen, who wrote a book about payphone history and owns a Wisconsin-based company called Phoneco that sells payphones to customers like a prop company and a museum, said early payphones were bulky wooden machines called “pay stations.” In rural areas, people might have to turn a crank to contact the operator.

A call cost a nickel in the 1910s and 20s, he said, increased to a dime in about 1940 and eventually jumped to a quarter.

The survivors

At Centennial Hills Hospital, there’s still a payphone near the emergency department. A four minute call costs $1, which one can pay with coins or a credit card.

Hospital spokeswoman Gretchen Papez said its intended users include people who don’t have cell phones or whose phone batteries have died. The phone is owned by WiMacTel, which didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Officer Robert Wicks, a Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson, said the Clark County detention center has a non-working payphone in the booking area.

Next to the restrooms at Jerry’s Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas, there’s a payphone that’s missing its receiver and has an out-of-order sticker covering part of the coin slot. A second payphone in an entryway appears to be in better shape, but no longer has a dial tone. A WiMacTel label advertises local calls at a rate of 50 cents for 15 minutes.

Martha Diaz, a casino manager, can remember when people made calls on the phones frequently, but said she hasn’t seen someone use them in about eight or nine years.

But at the Mob Museum, a payphone is still a popular attraction.

The museum has a phone booth that was once in the Four Deuces, the Chicago headquarters of Al Capone, said Claire White, the museum’s director of education. The museum acquired it from a collector in 2019 for an amount she said she could not disclose. The booth contains a 1920s payphone, but not the original one.

“There’s always been a connection between payphones and organized crime,” White said. Using a payphone was a way to avoid wiretapping, she said.

Most of the museum’s artifacts are behind glass, but visitors are allowed to get in the booth and open and close the door.

“It’s definitely one of the most unique artifacts we have on display,” she said.

It’s also one of the museum’s most popular sites for photos.

Big business

Before they were relics of the pre-digital age, payphones were lucrative.

“They made obscene amounts of money and then all of a sudden, they didn’t,” said Las Vegas attorney Robert Bolick, who represented a payphone company called Pay Phones of Nevada.

Gregory Balelo, who is still listed as an officer of a company called Interwest Payphone in state records, said his small company once had about 150 to 200 payphones, mostly in indoor locations like casinos, taverns and convenience stores. Interwest was incorporated in 1987.

Most of its income came from casinos, he said, but business was also good in the employee areas of hotels and in sportsbooks. Long distance calls were lucrative too.

The business began declining around 2000 as cell phones became cheaper and more reliable. He got rid of his last payphone in about 2008 and thinks it was probably at the South Point.

“It was part of my life for a long time and it was very good to me,” Balelo said of the payphone business.

And payphones can still inspire nostalgia.

Posters on Las Vegas Reddit threads have attempted to track down payphones and share sitings. Some of the suggestions for where a person might find payphones are tongue-in-cheek: “in jail” or “Back in the 1990s.”

Balelo said he still has some payphones that he hasn’t scrapped and recently found some handsets in storage.

“I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away,” he said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com, especially if you know of a payphone we missed. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.