Dem Candidate Mike Bloomberg Tells his News Reporters Not to Dig into His Life or Finances

Michael Bloomberg, the 77-year-old billionaire and former mayor of New York City, is running for President.  This puts the Bloomberg journalists in a precarious position.

Really precarious.

Turns out, this Democrat is not that big on freedom of the press.  “Quite honestly, I don’t want all the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me,” he said to a radio interviewer in 2018, even suggesting he might end Bloomberg News’s political coverage if he ran for President. “I don’t want them to be independent.”

Perhaps this would be a funny joke, if Bloomberg’s wealth, family, and personal life were not already off limits to reporters.  

This weekend, the journalists at Bloomberg got a memo detailing what their boss expected of them as he officially launched a Presidential run. The Washington Post describes it:

The policy, as detailed over the weekend in a memo from top editor John Micklethwait: 

Journalists will not dig into Bloomberg himself (or his charitable endeavors, business practices, family, etc.) or into his Democratic rivals. They will cover developments in the campaign on a more superficial level.

Micklethwait:“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). And in the stories we write on the presidential contest, we will make clear that our owner is now a candidate.”

Bloomberg News also will publish other organizations’ investigations, sometimes in summary form.

However, for now, they will continue to investigate President Trump.

But I didn’t have to tell you that last line, did I?

Even worse, top opinion editors David Shipley and Tim O’Brien are leaving their roles and joining the campaign, which verifies the fears that conservatives have had all along: the top opinion editors at these media outlets are simply Democratic operatives in thin disguise.

Margaret Sullivan sums up the problem really powerfully.

“Built into good journalism is independence. It’s a requirement, the very foundation — the sine qua non, since we seem to like three-word Latin phrases these days. ‘Without which, not’: the essential element,” she writes.  “Making a crucially important area of coverage off-limits saws away at that foundation, leaving everything that remains in an unstable state.”

That’s exactly right.  The next time you hear Democrats talking about the importance of the press, remember that prominent Democrats like Bloomberg are happy to sacrifice it for their own advancement.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Hat Tip: Washington Post