Thank you for the link. I find things like this fascinating. I really wonder what life is like for the super-rich and politically connected. It must be a different world. I think the NYT piece does a fair job of not making unfounded and sensationalist claims, instead just pointing out connections.
I do wonder what went into Bloomberg not publishing it. This is what I bristle at: China being able to exert influence about what is and isn't published, what movies are and aren't made and so on.
It's even more problematic when China doesn't even need to exert that influence directly but instead rely on self-censorship from companies hoping to do business in China. Particularly news organization should never compromise themselves that way in the hopes of pleasing China (or at least not angering it). I hope Bloomberg didn't do this.
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?
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.
On the contrary, that is a separate issue, although an important one.
This story is about the integrity of reporting from Bloomberg. An important tradition in journalism is the firewall between the money making and the news reporting parts of an organization. Yes, that firewall is breached entirely too often, but many new media organizations simply don't have the tradition at the management level.
That is important to know, no matter who is applying pressure on the money side.
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.
Agree that the China angles are important and newsworthy (though it's important to note that Forsythe's reporting was eventually published by the NYT).
This article isn't about that, though: it's about companies with deep pockets trying to silence not just their (former) employees, but their employees' family members as well. Considering that companies like Bloomberg have the resources to financially ruin people if they don't comply, and seemed like they were fully ready to exercise that option, this is incredibly troubling.
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.
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.
It's really not the same things - in some lights that story makes the CCP look good. Not in a good-vs-evil way, but it makes it look like they have far-reaching powers, and are an entity to be feared and respected.
A story about CCP leaders becoming filthy rich off the backs of the oppressed majority though, that just make the CCP look bad.
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...
“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
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.
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?
> "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.
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.
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?
* 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!
> 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".
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.
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.
> 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 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.
From 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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-a...
[+] [-] cletus|6 years ago|reply
I do wonder what went into Bloomberg not publishing it. This is what I bristle at: China being able to exert influence about what is and isn't published, what movies are and aren't made and so on.
It's even more problematic when China doesn't even need to exert that influence directly but instead rely on self-censorship from companies hoping to do business in China. Particularly news organization should never compromise themselves that way in the hopes of pleasing China (or at least not angering it). I hope Bloomberg didn't do this.
[+] [-] veeralpatel979|6 years ago|reply
http://archive.is/npL70
[+] [-] jolmg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drtillberg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|6 years ago|reply
This story is about the integrity of reporting from Bloomberg. An important tradition in journalism is the firewall between the money making and the news reporting parts of an organization. Yes, that firewall is breached entirely too often, but many new media organizations simply don't have the tradition at the management level.
That is important to know, no matter who is applying pressure on the money side.
[+] [-] seneca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|6 years ago|reply
This article isn't about that, though: it's about companies with deep pockets trying to silence not just their (former) employees, but their employees' family members as well. Considering that companies like Bloomberg have the resources to financially ruin people if they don't comply, and seemed like they were fully ready to exercise that option, this is incredibly troubling.
[+] [-] adelHBN|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jgalt212|6 years ago|reply
- Sign this NDA, get the money you want or need.
- Don't publish critical articles about the nomenclatura if you want our money (via terminal sales in the Chinese market)
[+] [-] tynpeddler|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] briandear|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tren-hard|6 years ago|reply
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/...
[+] [-] djrogers|6 years ago|reply
A story about CCP leaders becoming filthy rich off the backs of the oppressed majority though, that just make the CCP look bad.
[+] [-] meowface|6 years ago|reply
It's unfortunate, because I used to consider them one of the most neutral mainstream news sources.
[+] [-] valuearb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
Pretty apt for our global society, too.
[+] [-] adequateness|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-china/australia...
[+] [-] eric_b|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] frakkingcylons|6 years ago|reply
* 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=l...
[+] [-] jxramos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buckminster|6 years ago|reply
https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428
[+] [-] dahdum|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] a3n|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] neycoda|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 93po|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adelHBN|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dntbnmpls|6 years ago|reply
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-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.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|6 years ago|reply
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-bloomber...
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|6 years ago|reply
...
> 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".
[+] [-] bbgthrowaway|6 years ago|reply
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-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.
[+] [-] rdtsc|6 years ago|reply
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-no...
[+] [-] kelnos|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackfoxy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhegart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worik|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
Maybe they shouldn't. But for that reason, maybe they shouldn't be in the Journo business?
[+] [-] abvdasker|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moron4hire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everybodyknows|6 years ago|reply
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.