Bloomberg's Folly

[Disir]

The crisis blew into public view last November when The New York Times, followed by the Financial Times and others, reported that a big, new enterprise project from Bloomberg, said to have documented an extensive web of corrupt ties between one of China’s wealthiest businessmen and elite politicians, had been spiked at an unusually late stage in the editing process. The reported spike came after an extensively footnoted version of the story had been fact-checked and pored over by company lawyers, and after members of the reporting team had been praised internally for yet more stellar work. The Times reported that Winkler, in a conference call with reporters, defended the decision not to publish the story by likening the situation to the need for self-censorship by foreign bureaus in Nazi Germany to preserve their ability to continue reporting there. That reasoning was controversial enough, but a Bloomberg executive would later let slip a motive that was even more problematic.

Like a car wreck in slow motion, the team that produced this work began falling apart. In November 2013, days after the first Times story, Bloomberg abruptly suspended Michael Forsythe, a lead writer on the China investigative work whom the company appeared to blame for leaking details about the killing of the latest project. Forsythe, who had faced death threats in China for his earlier work on Xi, has since left the company and joined The New York Times in Hong Kong. He declined to speak for this story, citing a non-disclosure agreement with Bloomberg.

The crackup continued over the next few months. Bloomberg’s Projects and Investigation team, which had done much of the groundbreaking China work, was thrown into chaos, worsened by the resignations of two senior editors deeply involved in the projects. One was Amanda Bennett, a top enterprise editor.*

The defining moment, however, the one that has dealt the deepest shock to Bloomberg and may affect it for years, was a widely reported speech by the company’s chairman, Peter T. Grauer, who in March said, in effect, that Bloomberg had gotten carried away with its investigative journalism in China to the detriment of its true vocation: selling computerized terminals that provide financial information.

“We have about 50 journalists in the market, primarily writing stories about the local business and economic environment,” Grauer said in answer to a questioner after a speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. “You’re all aware that every once in a while we wander a little bit away from that and write stories that we probably may have kind of rethought—should have rethought.”

During his Hong Kong visit, according to people present, Grauer had also told the bureau there that the company’s sales team had been forced to do a “heroic job” repairing the company’s relations with Chinese officials following the Xi Jinping story. He warned the Bloomberg staff that the company would “be straight back in the shit-box” in China if “we were to do anything like that again,” one source said.
- See more at: Bloomberg's folly : Columbia Journalism Review

What a bunch of idiocy. Really.