The news agency is under fire for allegedly killing stories that would upset the Chinese government. Gwynn Guilford and Gideon Lichfield have details:
The New York Times reported last week that Bloomberg had scrapped an investigative report linking China’s richest man with top party officials, as well as another article on children of Chinese leaders working at foreign banks. The Financial Times followed up today (paywall) with similar allegations. According to both papers, Matt Winkler, Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, spiked the reports after they had already been fact-checked and vetted by lawyers; he allegedly told reporters on a conference call that if Bloomberg ran stories of that nature, it risked being “kicked out of China.” Winkler and other senior executives say he made no such claim, and suggested that the stories had not been scrapped but merely weren’t yet good enough to publish.
CJR’s Dean Starkman fears the worst:
News “employees” (as the Times calls them) don’t usually put their jobs on the line to talk about stories they feel are being spiked (or “postponed,” as Bloomberg puts it), no matter how bitter the internal arguments. …
There is rarely a “smoking gun” in such matters, so to speak, and it’s a difficult argument to win outright, so most frustrated reporters don’t go public on such matters, even through leaks. Plus, generally there aren’t that many people involved in an internal controversy like this, so sources are more vulnerable to exposure than they might be in your usual inside-the-newsroom stories, like, for instance, Politico’s gossipy piece on Jill Abramson. The allegations there were so vague and catty that anyone could have been the source. That’s not the case in the Bloomberg affair. And yet whomever the sources were leaked the dispute anyway, in some detail and at considerable career risk – with little upside. That’s unusual and, in my opinion, it tips the scales in their favor.
Fallows thinks through the company’s motivations:
The less-damaging rationale for this decision is Bloomberg’s concern that its reporters might be kicked out of China. The more-damaging suspicion is that the company was worried that it would lose subscribers in China for its cash-cow Bloomberg financial terminals.
But he adds that the real story here is China itself:
[L]et’s not lose sight of the larger point: Bloomberg is (apparently) wrong for acquiescing, but the real problem is obviously with the parts of the Chinese government that are afraid of what domestic and international reporters would say. Which brings us to the day’s second bit of downbeat news: the Chinese government’s refusal to renew a visa for Paul Mooney, a well-respected reporter who has spent his career covering Asia. Apparently the government didn’t like his tone about Tibet. This is part of a much more widespread pattern of making it hard for international journalists to get into China.
This is not the way a confident, big-time government behaves.
The Dish 