Senator Harry Reid to newspaper: 'I hope you go out of business'

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is caused a controversy by telling one of his home state newspapers that he wants to see them shut down.

Reid told the Las Vegas Journal-Review's advertising director that "I hope you go out of business," at a luncheon on Wednesday. The Journal-Review's publisher Sherman Frederick is accusing Senator Reid of bullying his newspaper, after a recent poll showed that he was in trouble for his 2010 reelection bid. Frederick wrote a column today hammering Reid for his remark to the employee. "No citizen should expect this kind of behavior from a U.S. senator. It is certainly not becoming of a man who is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate. And it absolutely is not what anyone would expect from a man who now asks Nevadans to send him back to the Senate for a fifth term," Frederick's column said. There has been no comment yet from Senator Reid's office about the remark and if he happened to be serious when making it. The Las Vegas Journal-Review has been known to challenge Reid on various issues, which could have played a part in why Reid made the comment to the employee.