Bloomberg News Announces It Will Not Investigate Mike Bloomberg, Or Any Of His Democratic Rivals
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sun, 11/24/2019
What happens when a billionaire finance and media mogul announces he is running for president? How does his media empire avoid running into countless conflicts of interest? Well, in the case of Bloomberg News, which is the sole domain of Michael Bloomberg who officially entered the 2020 presidential race on Sunday morning, the company’s editor-in-chief just announced that it will extend its long-running policy of not doing any investigative reporting on its owner to all of his Democratic competitors who are also running for president.
Or, as Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait put it, “We cannot treat Mike’s Democratic competitors differently from him.”
And that’s why handing America’s free media into the hands of a handful of organizations and a few billionaires is generally a bad idea, because sooner or later one or all of them decide that the world will be better if they run it, and the conflicts of interest explode, which means far less coverage of precisely those who need the most investigation at precisely the most important time – just when they are about to be elected president.
To be sure, members of the press were stunned by this development, including Bloomberg competitors such as Reuters…
Wowsers. Bloomberg News will not be investigating Bloomberg or any Democrat in the primary and senior members of the editorial board are joining his campaign: https://t.co/u0rxLGZAWZ
— Amanda Becker (@AmandaBecker) November 24, 2019
… as well as Daily Mail’s David Martosko.
How do you wrap your mind around this? I can't.
Editorial board members joining the boss's campaign? A pledge to not investigate him? A parallel pledge to not investigate any other Democrats?
Is that newsgathering or a campaign contribution? What's the in-kind value of this? https://t.co/jD9DdvjE5L
— David Martosko (@dmartosko) November 24, 2019
But it was Bernie Sanders’ speechwriter David Sirota who may have put it best:
Every reporter covering 2020 knows that if they write a story seriously scrutinizing Mike Bloomberg, they risk enraging a person who owns a sizable segment of the media job market. It’s a very tough situation for journalists, and probably not a great dynamic for democracy.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 23, 2019
On the other hand, while Bloomberg News will no longer cover any of the potential Democratic presidents, period, its “P&I team will continue to investigate the Trump administration, as the government of the day”, albeit with the running disclaimer that its boss sees himself as Trump’s biggest challenger. Good luck with objective reporting there.
The Rest…HERE
