Is Bloomberg Caving To Communist China, Ctd?

It sure looks more and more like it:

A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China, which employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors, was suspended last week by managers. The reporter, Michael Forsythe, was based in Hong Kong and has written award-winning investigative articles on China. He met with supervisors and was placed on leave, said two Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the situation, which was supposed to be private.

Joshua Keating sees a clash between Bloomberg’s editorial and business interests:

According to unnamed Bloomberg employees, that story had been killed over fears that the company, whose news website is already blocked in China, would be expelled entirely. Amazingly, this whole story may have been first broken in a video by Taiwan’s Next Media Animation studio, which in its own inimitable way implied that the whole affair may be tied to soon-to-be-ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s business interests. That may be a stretch, but there certainly does seem to be an inherent conflict between the goals of Bloomberg’s top-notch investigative team, and the company’s interest in maintaining its lucrative terminal business in China. Last week, the New York Times’  Ed Wong, who seems to be getting pretty unfettered reports from inside the company, reported on the existence of “Code 204,” a line of coding that Bloomberg editors attach to certain articles on political and social issues in China so that they don’t appear on financial terminals on the mainland.

Dean Starkman is concerned:

There’s a lot, obviously, we don’t know—but that’s a problem in and of itself. Bloomberg’s hallmark – from its see-through headquarters to its entire corporate rationale – emphasizes transparency above all else. It was a key talking point, for instance, in its justly famous, successful lawsuit against the Federal Reserve’s secretive emergency lending programs during the crisis. … [This] issue is sensitive, involving unpublished material and personnel decisions. But suspending a reporter who is already involved in a very public controversy without further explanation is the opposite approach, in some ways very un-Bloomberg-like, and one unlikely to end the crisis.

Previous Dish on the scandal here.