Bloomberg News employees have been instructed not to investigate the 2020 Democratic primary candidates, according to an internal memo obtained this weekend by CNN. Worse, Bloomberg News is also suspending its editorial board so that certain members can join owner Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 Democratic campaign, which launched shortly before the newsroom changes were announced.
This is astonishing. A news organization that publishes roughly 5,000 stories per day, employs 2,700 staffers, and has a footprint in 120 countries is going to forgo original investigative reporting on the 2020 Democratic candidates. One of the two ruling parties in the United States is choosing its presidential nominee, and Bloomberg News would rather avoid angering its owner than volunteer even a small portion of its vast resources toward investigating any of the would-be nominees?
It is a golden era of truth-telling, I tell you!
“So Mike is running,” Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait said in a memo to staff. “There is no point in trying to claim that covering this presidential campaign will be easy for a newsroom that has built up its reputation for independence in part by not writing about ourselves (and very rarely about our direct competitors).”
The memo adds, “No previous presidential candidate has owned a journalistic organization of this size. We have electoral laws to follow — to do with both balance and opinion. We will certainly obey them, but I think we need to do more than just that — and I believe we can.”
Micklethwait then instructed Bloomberg News staffers to “extend” the organization’s policy “of not investigating Mike (and his family and foundation)” to “his rivals in the Democratic primaries.”
“We cannot treat Mike’s Democratic competitors differently from him,” Micklethwait’s memo adds. “If other credible journalistic institutions publish investigative work on Mike or the other Democratic candidates, we will either publish those articles in full or summarize them for our readers — and we will not hide them.”
He says, “We will describe who is winning and who is losing. We will look at policies and their consequences. We will carry polls, we will interview candidates and we will track their campaigns, including Mike’s.”
“We have already assigned a reporter to follow his campaign (just as we did when Mike was in City Hall),” Micklethwait adds. “And in the stories we write on the presidential contest, we will make clear that our owner is now a candidate.”
In case you had doubts, he also stresses that Bloomberg News will “continue to investigate the Trump administration, as the government of the day.”
Of course.
But, hey, the memo adds, “If Mike is chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate (and Donald Trump emerges as the Republican one), we will reassess how we do that.”
As for Bloomberg News’s commentary side, Micklethwait explains:
This may be worse than the news side mandate. Members of Bloomberg News’s editorial team will join Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign and then presumably return to their gigs on the board once the primary comes to a close? This is not even swampy behavior. That is straight-up sewer material.
There is an easy solution to this. Bloomberg News could just, you know, cover the former mayor like a normal candidate and not a precious Fabergé egg. For all the complaining we hear and do about the White House and its supposed war on the news media, there is nothing that the Trump administration has done that is so ugly and contrary to the principles of a free and open press as Bloomberg News’s self-muzzling during an election year to keep its billionaire owner happy.
