21 ms·

After killing investigation, Bloomberg News sought to silence reporter's wife

• bt1a 7y ago
  Spent a few minutes trying to decipher why Bloomberg would go through such hoops to silence his own wife.
  • zarmin 7y ago
    Her name is Ms. Placedmodifier
  • dang 7y ago
    We've changed the title above to that of the HTML doc, which fits the 80 char limit. (Submitted title was "Bloomberg Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter Then Tried to Silence His Wife", which I'm sure was cut to that to try to fit the limit.)
    • lisper 6y ago
      Please consider extending the limit to 120 or 140 characters. 80 often forces me to produce a misleading condensation in my submissions. In the alternative, add a "privileged comment" pinned to the top of the page which cannot be replied to, where an extended summary of the submission can be added by the submitter. But just changing the character limit of the title is probably a lot easier.
    • roosterdawn 6y ago
      This issue comes up a lot. As a sibling comment says, if it is so common an occurrence for the character limit to lead to misleading headlines because they were overly condensed, you may want to consider slightly expanding the headline length limit (perhaps to 120-140). But I appreciate that it's a balancing act, because making it too long dilutes the punchiness of the HN front page itself. No easy answer here.
      • dang 6y ago
        It comes up somewhat regularly but it's quite rare for there to be a case where there isn't a natural solution. For example in this case the HTML doc title not only fit the limit nicely, but was more neutral and thus better for HN. I think HN benefits from this limit.
  • lpah4all 7y ago
    Nixon's Attorney General, the horrible, horrible man, John Mitchell, had his wife silenced by drugging and sequestering her. "If you guys could get John Mitchell, that would be beautiful." (Quote from All the President's Men) There's an interesting 1994 BBC documentary, "The Watergate Affair" that talks about it. Mitchell was one of the few players in that sordid saga that didn't speak on camera. They're such a bunch of smug bastards, the lot of them, except for John Dean; he's only half an ass. But, yeah, what was the elephant doing in your pajamas?
    • ashtonkem 7y ago
      Nixon personally blamed Martha Mitchell for the scandal and impeachment.
      • lpah4all 6y ago
        The same guy who told Frost, "Well, if the President did it, it's not illegal." Clearly, his grip on reality was a long time gone in service to his power-seeking for his constituency. Even a president can be a data point in Dunning & Kruger's "too stupid to know how stupid they are" category. Now, we have a mobbed-up slumlord 1000x more stupid and infinitely more amoral. He is a true credit to the GOP's fundamental guiding principles.
        • ashtonkem 6y ago
          It’s interesting to think what Nixon could’ve been if he wasn’t so paranoid and vindictive. Arguably the shenanigans in Watergate weren’t even necessary to secure a victory.
          • lpah4all 6y ago
            Yeah, it kinda seems that he was only a personality defect or two away from being a truly great President, with all his foreign policy successes. But, really, the GOP was already fully evil by then; they just got caught doing what they do to the other politicians, instead of to our own poor, especially minorities. And, sure, his victory was likely beyond doubt, but people so hell-bent on power are way beyond being able to not seize every advantage they can gain, no matter how risky. Amoral and ravenous, their momentum and self-belief are beyond examination. Watergate changed nothing but at least we caught a glimpse of their true nature, which was then, in their desperation, magnified in how far they went in the coverup. And is now utterly epitomized in the Dear Leaders of many nations.
  • ashtonkem 7y ago
    I believe this is what’s called a “Garden Path” sentence, because it leads you to the wrong conclusion initially.
  • wastedhours 7y ago
    Originally thought it was an investigation about a killing, made the second half of the title all the more sinister.
• nimbius 7y ago
  Matthew Winkler, the editor that recommended the action, is a baby boomer. its odd to see someone who lived through the McCarthy era and the cold war so eager to appease what throughout his lifetime was branded the enemy.
  • pstuart 7y ago
    Because money.
• xwdv 7y ago
  Let’s keep hackernews away from politics.
  • yasp 7y ago
    Michael Bloomberg is no longer a political candidate. This is about journalism.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Politics is a system like any other, to be observed, understood, and interacted with.
• yters 7y ago
  China is not really communist. It is just a really big corporation that treats its employees like crap, and sells their organs to rich Saudis and Westerners.
• tren-hard 7y ago
  Did Bloomberg change his opinions on China when they OK'd the "The Big Hack" in 2018? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h... The controversy that unfolded from that was massive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/22/your-move-bloomberg/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/...
  • valuearb 7y ago
    You would think they would have fired the reporters who faked that story.
    • duxup 7y ago
      Did they fake it? Or were they mistaken?
      • simonh 6y ago
        Apparently they still stand by the story, hard as that is to believe at this point.
      • lobotryas 6y ago
        Are you asking if there is evidence that it was intentionally wrong reporting? No, AFAIK there was no such evidence. Are you asking how, in good faith, such a factually wrong story could have made it to publication? We also don’t know. Are you asking why BB has not retracted it after being called out multiple times? Maybe hubris, maybe profit motive. At the end of the day, why would we trust anything BB publishes about China? They have Terminal licenses to sell and they don’t want to jeopardize their market.
        • duxup 6y ago
          Yeah that's pretty much what I was asking. It was a weird story with weird reactions from the companies involved ... but at least I never ran across anything that explained how the reporting played out / if there was anything 'faked" or anything like that. The whole thing seems to not have many answers.
• o10449366 7y ago
  Is HN really so fragile that two minutes after this is #1 on the front page its already been flagged spammed to death with no discussion?
• floatingatoll 7y ago
  The article that Bloomberg refused to publish, that was later published at NYT, is here (no prior discussion at HN): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-abillionaire-at-the-intersection-of-business-and-power-in-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-a...
  • jolmg 6y ago
    Off-topic, but I decided to finally make that free account NYT insists on, and NYT returns the error "Please enter a valid email address." It's a @fastmail.com address with no weird characters. Anyone else had that trouble before? Even more interesting is that just changing the domain to a personal one that uses one of the new gTLDs makes it work. I would have maybe expected the opposite to happen. Are they blacklisting Fastmail?
    • mzkply 6y ago
      probably, and mailinator
    • tomcatfish 6y ago
      I have had my personal domain (that I manage through Fastmail) that I use almost solely for mail rejected by Carmax before. Emails sent from them just fine, just couldn't use it to sign up.
    • danso 6y ago
      It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother blacklisting Fastmail – isn't Fastmail a paid service (i.e. less likely to be used by freeloaders, or by people making throwaway accounts)? In any case, no matter how much they want to squeeze money out of new users, the NYT has more incentive to not have a super strict blacklist, or overly onerous sign-up process. Signup numbers are still metrics that a company vice president/middle manager can brag about, and NYT's initiative of mandating free registration seems much too new (e.g. as a comparison, they had totally free access for more then a decade, then a leaky paywall for several additional years) for them to already have hard enforcement policies in place.
• drtillberg 7y ago
  One could write this article about Bloomberg ... or one could write this article about China. I think the China part of the story is more relevant and newsworthy at this point, considering how things have unfolded in the years since. The news company probably didn't decide all on its own to pursue this remarkable effort to kill a story that had not much to do with itself.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • seneca 6y ago
    Indeed. Making the headline here about Bloomberg smells of the exact kind of tiptoeing around the CCP that the article discusses. The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.
    • phkahler 6y ago
      >> The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government. ...with the full cooperation of western corporations.
      • smooth_remmy 6y ago
        ...and the full cooperation of the western elites and the government.
        • yibg 6y ago
          Probably because elites in china enjoy a huge advantage, and elites in the west would want that kind of advantage. If you got the power and money in China, with the right kind of connections you can literally get away with murder.
          • yters 6y ago
• buckminster 7y ago
  Plain text version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428
• brenden2 7y ago
  You can't trust "the news" anymore. Everything is just clickbait doomsday nonsense every day. It's incredibly hard to separate fact from fiction, opinion from fact, and reality from fantasy.
  • save_ferris 7y ago
    This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think we generally expect too much from media outlets. Readers also have a responsibility to understand the context of what they're reading, and that's been true for as long as newspapers have existed. Take everything you read with a grain of salt, know that a story might later be retracted or edited, and follow different outlets with different perspectives. I think the homogenization of media consumption is far more dangerous than the fake and false stories that get out.
    • zaroth 6y ago
      If publishers didn’t have special protections under the law for the false and defamatory things that they say, they wouldn’t have a special responsibility to only print the truth.
      • save_ferris 6y ago
        I don’t know about that. What’s so strange to me about the state of media in the US is that most people don’t seem to pay for it anymore. Online publishing outlets are largely funded by advertising, which we on HN know is one of the more unsavory monetization strategies out there. Of course it’s going to perverse incentives. Those complaining about how fake news is these days likely expect a perfect product that they refuse to pay for while simultaneously demanding that they not use the perverse advertising/CTR models that encourages things like clickbait titles. How is that supposed to work? That’s like expecting Facebook to remain free whilst not selling user data.
    • leoh 6y ago
      I think this is a reasonable position. In general, the media itself has convinced us of its importance and at times. Which it is, but I think that less scrupulous entities have abused this privilege to a truly distasteful and disappointing degree.
• JPKab 7y ago
  I've personally found that saying critical things about the Chinese Communist Party on this website results in people quickly conflating said attacks on a government with a non-existent ethnic group (ignoring the fact that China has multiple ethnic groups instead of just the dominant Han majority) and suddenly you are flagged for being a bigot. It's pretty obnoxious behavior that is very dominant in Silicon Valley. I view it as primarily driven at the bottom by people who see all bigotry through a purely Western lens (and are therefore blind to the fact that "white" privilege is actually "dominant ethnic group" privilege and changes depending on where you are), don't know anything about China other than it being an Asian country, and equate criticizing the country as being Western imperialism. From the top, it's money money money, because hey, who cares about Uighurs anyway, I just got a billion from some dude whose dad fought for Mao and is now a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party. Now I'll go talk about how much I value diversity while my company is funded by a country which imprisons people because they are Muslim, or criticize the government, or, you know, tell the truth.
  • twomoretime 7y ago
    >'ve personally found that saying critical things about the Chinese Communist Party on this website results in people quickly conflating said attacks on a government with a non-existent ethnic group Been banned for it under the guise of flamebait. Didn't say anything inflammatory. What's worse is that we know the CCP employs a "troll army" for astroturfing all over the web, but on every major platform a pro China post would simply never be silenced - so the CCP in short is playing our own institutions against us because we increasingly cannot separate criticism from intolerance.
    • lobotryas 6y ago
      The CCP buys the people it can by offering or denying them access to a huge market. See how Bloomberg LP wanted to keep selling terminal licenses in China. The CCP silences people it can by labeling them as racists for speaking out against its government apparatus. It uses misguided westerners and, I’m sure, it’s own agitprop machine for this purpose. Finally the CCP kills people within its borders that can neither be bought nor silenced with shame. Everyone from political dissidents to the doctor who first publicly raised the alarm bell on Corona (he was forced to confess to crimes of inciting panic) to the Uighur minority. The world does not oppose the CCP because it’s either greedy, scared for their reputation, uncaring or dead.
• duxup 7y ago
  It really brings home the importance of freedom ... elsewhere. It seems like a very real likelihood that China would choose to track people's sentiments about China elsewhere ... and at will pressure outside companies to remove or simply not hire people who they wish to punish / discourage. Post a winnie the pooh pic / are on the list? Good luck...
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, 1963 Pretty apt for our global society, too.
    • birdyrooster 6y ago
      This argument is one that the left fails to make perennially. That improving the conditions of one necessarily improves the conditions of all and that policy that focuses on the most vulnerable helps everyone more still. The left will win Wall Street (and thus elections) when they finally show that social programs provide mitigation allowing Wall Street to minimize losses and a multiplier to increase their earnings.
      • duxup 6y ago
        I feel like most folks you'd be talking about when it comes to whomever is "Wall Street" just care about next quarter ... and the next, and whatever tax advantages they can mange in the meantime. As a group they're not interested in long term outcomes at least as far as government policy goes. I think they should, but I don't think it motivates them.
      • jmeister 6y ago
        Agreed. The left should learn from the Trump campaign, who put a positive, constructive spin on a fundamentally anti-establishment platform. Trump’s MAGA vs. Bernie’s angry finger-pointing
• 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  My eyes have been open to China’s influence in US media, especially with covid-19 outbreak, where they’re rallied various institutions to change the narrative around the name and origin of the virus. For example, Dreamworks carrying water for the CCP government by including the 9-dotted line prominently on a map in their movie[1]. Who thinks this inclusion was by accident? Their influence in US media and politics is out of control. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks-movie-vietnam-ban-south-china-sea-map-2019-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks-movie-...
  • eej71 6y ago
    The Top Gun movie that's not yet released went through similar editing. https://www.businessinsider.com/top-guns-maverick-appears-changed-to-please-chinas-communist-party-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/top-guns-maverick-appears-ch...
    • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
      The Taiwanese flag was replaced with some generic triangle. Taiwan sovereignty is considered a very “delicate” issue by the Chinese government, which is to say the language and depiction of it is greatly censored, both at home and abroad apparently.
      • Chris2048 6y ago
        The Japanese flag appears to have been replaced with a red triangle, the Taiwanese flag with some other design.
  • jxramos 6y ago
    It's somewhat amusing all the fuss over the legitimacy conveyed through maps, as if the map illustrator consulted some gold standard reference of truth. There was a time some centuries past when maps were approximations of reality. I think this comes down to the play on human nature of: when you say something frequently enough it's assumed to be true. Where is the relevant international law assuming there is one that expresses territorial waters.
• axiom123 7y ago
  wow
• rdtsc 6y ago
  > Last month, a Bloomberg corporate spokeswoman told The New York Times that Forsythe stole "Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property and gave it to his wife." The spokeswoman, Natalie Harland, said that Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg News never pressured anyone to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The good ol' we never pressured we just warned we'd harass them to no end and ruin their lives. It was rather entertaining to see an old billionaire who rarely hears "no" from those around him being put on the spot during the primary debates by Elizabeth Warren. All those millions spent on his advertising campaign didn't help, and there were no lawyers and PR spokespeople to draft responses for him. Yeah, he eventually agree to release a few women who had NDAs signed if they requested. I think one might have gone through the process. But I can see being afraid to go through the process since a week later they could be sued for other things like "stole Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property" and then having to sell their homes to defend against it. It's just so bizarre how he got any support at all. Look at the things he was saying: "...and that upon learning that a female employee was expecting a baby, he responded: Kill it!" from https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg-nondisclosure-release/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg-no...
  • kelnos 6y ago
    > It's just so bizarre how he got any support at all. I mean... Donald Trump is our president, so if Bloomberg gaining any support is bizarre, we've already been in bizzaro world for the last 4 years. It's not like the Democrat side of the house is squeaky-clean when it comes to its candidates not doing shitty things.
    • rdtsc 6y ago
      > Donald Trump is our president, Good point. And I am thinking people who supported Bloomberg are the ones who protested for the last three years then a decent amount of them turn around and follow another old white billionaire from New York as a viable candidate. Not only that one with who was telling his employees to kill their babies. You'd think 3 years would be plenty to come up with well ... someone else.
      • 6y ago
• djrogers 6y ago
  I've seen it here in small amounts before, but it's rather shocking to observe so much obviously biased downvoting and flagging in one story. A number of anti-CCP posts already dead, and others on their way... I suppose it's rather predictable that people can't post something about the CCP on a meta-story about the CCP killing news stories, without their posts in turn being killed.
  • pwned1 6y ago
    I came to this thread to observe the same behavior, without any plans to comment, expecting any comment that is even mildly anti-CCP to be heavily downvoted. But I just had to second your own observation at the peril to my own karma.
    • phkahler 6y ago
      Fortunately we dont live in a country where you online karma is relevant. Yet...
      • Der_Einzige 6y ago
        What do you call your credit score?
        • jmeister 6y ago
          False equivalence. Credit scores measure failure to honor financial contracts. They’re not about honoring arbitrary social norms
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • ignoramous 6y ago
        > Platforms like Arya — which says it’s been used by Home Depot and Dyson — go even further, using machine learning to find candidates based on data that might be available on a company’s internal database, public job boards, social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, and other profiles available on the open web, like those on professional membership sites. https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-intelligence-ai-job-screen https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-in...
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  I am very confused by the events and timeline detailed in the article. Bloomberg (Edit: Bloomberg News) published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned for it. But this article says they were still investigating and writing that story in 2013. And that they buried it. And that they did so to avoid upsetting the CCP etc. They even have quotes: "late Oct 2013": >"It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country," Winkler said. "So, I just don't see that as a story that is justified." Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for already publishing this story!? Has someone just massively screwed up their dates? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship-bloomberg/bloomberg-sites-blocked-in-china-days-after-xi-family-wealth-story-idUSBRE86306820120704 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship-bloomber... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C... There is a lot to discuss here: * The extent that spouses' activities effect employee NDAs * When and whether NDAs are appropriate both in Journalism and other industries * The CCP and Chinese governments abuse of economic powers to silent dissent, in this case internationally and US and other governments compliance with that policy. * Connections between wealth and political power, both in China and the world * Whether being part of the larger Bloomberg entity strengthens BBG News or makes them more liable to external pressure I also think Winklers position (assuming it was his position, since apparently all this happened after it had already happened?) was very sensible: >Winkler alluded to that in his remarks. "There's a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we've tried to build there," he told the reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story. Aka: we can't publish this as we do too much business there, but we could leak it to someone else without the same exposure Sadly the article seems to make a bad job of covering the basic facts and it's can't help but quote emotional projection instead of giving clear outlines of events. Good luck with this one (gender non-specific) guys!
  • vonmoltke 6y ago
    > Bloomberg published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned for it. ... > Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for already publishing this story!? No, the Bloomberg News websites were blocked. Bloomberg News reporters were not thrown out, Bloomberg Terminal sales were not terminated. Blocking the websites is a far cry from "kick[ing] us out of the country".
• coliveira 6y ago
  Let's not forget that this company published the largest fake news about China that one could conceive: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... I haven't seen any retractions of this piece of garbage that has been denied by any and all Western companies that were supposed "victims".
  • knowaveragejoe 6y ago
    Sorry, where is the refutation to this?
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Apple and Amazon produced detailed statements[1] explaining that they never found what the reporters say they found. And nobody has yet produced any concrete evidence of the spy chips existing; no example, no picture, no documents referring to them. It's impossible to definitively refute anonymous claims that some secret thing exists, but I think it's unreasonable to believe them. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-deny-servers-chinese-spy-chips https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-den...
      • redis_mlc 6y ago
        > this company published the largest fake news about China that one could conceive Was this particular article based on evidence? We don't know. Was it 100% plausible and done by governments all the time? Absolutely. Are IPMI, BMC and managemnt engines complete garbage from a security standpoint? Absolutely. So I find the strong language very over the top. If you know the history of weakening security equipment, then you wouldn't even bat an eye over this. You know how bad Zoom security is? It's actually 10x better than any IPMI or BMC code. I'd get worked up about that, which is on every server motherboard already.
        • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
• williesleg 6y ago
  Weird, with Hillary it would have been after killing reporter and his wife, Hillary fires off investigation against..... Bloomberg has it backwards.
• jackfoxy 6y ago
  From Alcibiades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades to Michael Bloomberg, it's always the elites who sell out their country. Of course it's only the elites who have have something of value enough on that scale to sell. Love of country is for the hoi polloi.
• dahdum 6y ago
  > "They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife," author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher says. "I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being." I understand she sees it that way, but I keep coming to the exact opposite conclusion. They knew she was a respected journalist with enough clout to be heard and a riveting story of fleeing Beijing for fear of their lives. They were clearly afraid of her as an individual. I'm not defending Bloomberg, but I don't see any easy answers here. Publishing the second investigation would (in their estimation) have shut down all their reporting in China, put more reporters in personal risk / fleeing, and significantly hurt their core revenue.
• eric_b 6y ago
  I was a long time Bloomberg Businessweek subscriber until last year. Starting around 2017 China started taking out multi page ads at the beginning of each issue. (Or at least that's when I noticed). The editorial slant became predictably sympathetic to China as well. So much so that by the end when I canceled my subscription there were many outright pro-China propaganda pieces. Interestingly the editorial slant also went much further left, politically. Not sure if the two are related.
  • jxramos 6y ago
    Is that somewhat unprecedented to have a government post ads in a publication which are not related to spreading the word about hiring or something. What exactly did those full page ads have as content?
    • adequateness 6y ago
      I dob't know if it is the same content but China Daily, a daily newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, has purchased full page ads in American news papers that look like news articles. https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed-law-to-publish-propaganda-in-ny-times-wapo/ https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed-la...
  • frakkingcylons 6y ago
    The cover of one of Businessweek's editions this February is literally "Fragile China; Handle with Care", which had the following stories: * Coronavirus Stress-Tests China’s Fragile Financial System * The Death of a Doctor Poses the Greatest Threat to China’s Xi Yet * China Navigates the Latest Threat to Its Debt-Fueled Boom * China’s Silent Factories Fuel Workers’ Fears of Virus https://www.bloomberg.com/magazine/businessweek/20_09?sref=l9cJPceJ https://www.bloomberg.com/magazine/businessweek/20_09?sref=l...
• neycoda 6y ago
  I'm not an alt-righter but the news media seems almost as corrupt as our politicians.
  • carapace 6y ago
    FWIW, Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" et. al. is from the left.
  • 93po 6y ago
    It's almost like they serve the same people
    • nameless_me 6y ago
      The far right and far right behave similarly -- except the language used differs.
      • mirimir 6y ago
        It's not one dimensional.
• rhegart 6y ago
  I vehemently disagree with the blatant partisan lean of almost every news company, but this crony, spineless cowardice is a far greater sin in my opinion.
• tynpeddler 6y ago
  Aside from Bloomberg's scummy behavior, this story highlights the eternal dilemma of journalism. To write good stories, you need access to the subjects. But if the stories make the subjects look bad, you lose access. Coupled with the fact that newspapers don't always make a lot of money these days, and often rely on wealthy benefactors that make their money in other ways, you can end up in an awkward spot where one wrong story can damage a newspaper's base of information but also it's financial foundations. I don't think there's any good answer to this question.
  • yters 6y ago
    Why would Bloomberg need to continue selling terminals to China for the journalists to research and publish?
    • recursive 6y ago
      Because in order for their journalists to research and publish, Bloomberg must continue to exist.
      • yters 6y ago
        I suspect even if they lost the China market, Bloomberg would get along fine.
  • briandear 6y ago
    They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link. A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as PR organs for the constituencies they “cover?” The idea that you have to be nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing Xinhua-approved stories isn’t journalism, it’s PR. It’s not different than publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get kicked out, that still doesn’t preclude covering China — it just makes it harder — but it’s already hard, so there isn’t any difference. By letting China dictate coverage, that’s worse than no coverage at all since only an approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are inclined to accept that “truth” without challenge because $some_international_media_outlet reported it. China’s obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn’t human-to-human transmissible even after they knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn’t happen. Even more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free speech.
• chx 6y ago
  It's interesting how this is the same Bloomberg who have published the completely fake "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" story.
• a3n 6y ago
  Maybe we should rethink this idea of billionaire presidents. The proposition is that their immense wealth makes them immune to pressure and corruption. To the contrary, they have much, much more to lose than any normal citizen. What would President Bloomberg, or any other billionaire president, sell us out for to protect their pile and its increase?
• worik 6y ago
  I do not understand why any body would think that Bloomberg could do political stories in China. I do not understand why Bloomberg would be embarrassed about spiking political stories in China. I am not defending the press and political climate in China, but it is what it is. The Chinese make up their rules. Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business for the sake of some political journalists work? I am glad they got their story published - good work. But Bloomberg would be insane to publish it.
  • Chris2048 6y ago
    > Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business Maybe they shouldn't. But for that reason, maybe they shouldn't be in the Journo business?
  • abvdasker 6y ago
    Journalism is basically about disseminating information that is novel, relevant and, most importantly, truthful. If the profit motive becomes incompatible with those ideals, Bloomberg can certainly choose to pursue the profit motive instead. But as soon as they choose profit over truth, readers with some level of critical thinking ability should understand that Bloomberg News is no longer doing journalism, they're doing something else. The best news organizations are built entirely on their reputations, so a strategy that pursues profits at the expense of quality is, to me, probably not one that is good for an organization's longevity.
• adelHBN 6y ago
  China has been kicking out Western news reporters from highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost. See article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-working-for-the-wall-street-journal-new-york-times-washington-post-whose-press-credentials-end-in-2020-11584464690 https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-wo...
  • dntbnmpls 6y ago
    > highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost. Highly respected by whom? And I believe it was in response to Trump's ban on chinese journalists. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist-association-blasts-us-visa-limits-69427974 https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist-associa... It's not shocking that we'd ban chinese state propagandists and china would ban US state propagandists. It's silly to allow enemy propagandists in your country during a trade war.
• bbgthrowaway 6y ago
  I was kind of close to Forsythe's first investigation was published and his next one was silenced. The New York Times's similar, and subsequent, investigation into Wen Jiabao's corruption gained it a Pulitzer in 2013. Bloomberg journalists widely and correctly thought that the Pulitzer process showed a clear bias toward the NYT in favoring the paper's derivative work on an outgoing politician, rather than the trail-blazing work on the man who is now China's leader. Here's some context: In 2013, after decades of reporting, Bloomberg News had never won a single Pulitzer. It ate at Winkler. One of the reasons Bloomberg employed Forsythe and funded the investigations of him and his team was in pursuit of that prize. The news organization and the company showed a lot of courage in publishing Forsythe's first investigation. And it suffered huge economic consequences. Its terminal sales to banks in China slowed considerably after that. Bloomberg won its first Pulitzer two years later, in 2015, for a series of explainers on corporate tax inversions. That was after it had re-organized and some would say eviscerated the projects and investigations team that Forsythe worked on. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg-gets-its-first-pulitzer/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg-get... What Bloomberg realized, of course, as Bezos has realized with the Washington Post, is that owning a real news organization makes doing business complicated, because the best news stories contain information that someone wants to keep quiet. Bloomberg News has learned to toe the line on China, and that should scare people. It's a microcosm of how China intimidates individuals and businesses (and non-profits like the WHO) around the world.
• moron4hire 6y ago
  How does it work for an NDA to gag people over criminal activity?
• everybodyknows 6y ago
  >"It has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method that is ... smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who are in front of us and behind us everywhere," Winkler said, according to the audio reviewed by NPR and verified by others. "And that's who they are. And we should have no illusions about it." NPR's publication of this will surely lead to CCP pressure against Winkler, who will see him as a spy intent on leaking reportage out through other channels. And the world may lose still another channel of factual info out of China. One wonders how NPR management rationalized inclusion of this particular quote as being in the public interest.
• LowRentHomoThug 6y ago
  Oh, so I just dump imaginary email addresses their stupid input field, until something takes. They TRY to ask the mail domain if your user id represents a valid email inbox, but if your email provider doesn't support their request, NYT may bounce as unverifiable. Just shit in their retarded database with wild guesses, until it spams someone random and unknown with an account sign-up message. Then read their uninformative garbage, laugh at how useless they are as a news outlet, wash, rinse, repeat, haphazardly providing email addresses that don't belong to you as you go.