Bloomberg News Kills All Credibility: Kills Story Critical Of China, Fires Reporter Who Reveals This Fact

from the who-would-trust-them-again? dept

Yet another major news organization has decided that it no longer needs credibility. Bloomberg News got some attention last week after it came out that the editor-in-chief had told reporters to kill a series of stories "that might anger China" and then defended that decision by arguing it was similar to appeasing the Nazis. I'm not joking.

In the call late last month, Mr. Winkler defended his decision, comparing it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus trying to preserve their ability to report inside Nazi-era Germany, according to Bloomberg employees familiar with the discussion.

Apparently, the main story that was killed was by reporter Michael Forsythe, who had been working on it for nearly a year. And, oh yeah, it was scheduled to run the very same month that Bloomberg's CEO was "visiting China to strengthen business ties between the media-sensitive country and the financial services company." I'm sure that's a coincidence.

And... once the NY Times broke the story, Bloomberg fired Forsythe. Perhaps the firing isn't too surprising: revealing to a competing publication embarrassing information about your own publisher self-censoring to appease China (and justifying it by positively calling up images of appeasing Hitler) probably means you're going to lose your job. But, of course, the way to have built back at least some credibility after the news was revealed would have been to admit the mistake and let Forsythe publish the story. As it stands now, any reporting from Bloomberg should be automatically seen as suspect, as the editor-in-chief has admitted that he will appease local governments to keep them happy, and the reporting is expected to reflect that sort of propaganda-happy posture.

Filed Under: china, conflict of interest, journalism, michael forsythe
Companies: bloomberg