Trump bans Bloomberg News from events due to unethical coverage

Billionaire nanny state leader, former Republican mayor of New York and current Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has declared himself a 12th hour entry into the presidential race and announced a company-wide memo to his "journalists," They will not be allowed to do their journalistic due diligence and cannot report on any Democratic primary candidates, but Trump is fair game. Also, Bloomberg does not believe China's dictator, Xi, is a dictator, but that's another story.

Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, made the announcement about the outlet's policy of not reporting on Democrats, but there may be a question as to whether this amounts to an in kind donation to Bloomberg's campaign since they will be trying to dig up dirt on Trump.

The Compromised News Network (CNN) obtained the memo Micklethwait put out: 

“We cannot treat Mike's [Bloomberg’s] Democratic competitors differently than him. For the moment, our P&I team will continue to investigate the Trump administration, as the government of the day. If Mike emerges as the Democratic presidential candidate (and Donald Trump emerges as the Republican one), we will reassess how we do that.”

It seems like Bloomberg doesn't see the problem with the fact that he owns a media outlet and plans to go after his opponent in a presidential campaign. And he fails to see the irony in Trump wanting to find out whether the Bidens were guilty of corruption in Ukraine and China, in spite of the fact that Joe Biden was a Democratic nominee for 2020.

The Trump 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has called the decision “to formalize preferential reporting policies” both “troubling and wrong.”

“Bloomberg News has declared that they won’t investigate their boss or his Democrat competitors, many of whom are current holders of high office, but will continue critical reporting on President Trump,” Parscale said in a statement, according to Axios. “As President Trump’s campaign, we are accustomed to unfair reporting practices, but most news organizations don’t announce their biases so publicly.”

So the Trump administration appropriately hit back at the Bloomberg decision.

“Since they have declared their bias so openly, the Trump campaign will no longer credential representatives of Bloomberg News for rallies or other campaign events,” Parscale said. “We will determine whether to engage with individual reporters or answer inquiries from Bloomberg News on a case-by-case basis.”

How can anyone in good conscience blame them?

Kathy Kiely, a former editor at Bloomberg News, says she resigned after receiving similar instructions from the agency in 2016, when Bloomberg was also mulling a presidential run, according to CNN. And one can imagine that any decent reporter would have a problem with that directive.

“The same sort of directions were given, only it was not yet an official campaign, but I felt that that wasn’t ethical, and it was just an untenable situation for me as the assigning editor to be in,” said Kiely. “Unfortunately, they’ve had four years to think about this, and they haven’t come up with a better solution. I’m really sorry to see this.”

Ethics isn't completely dead in journalism.

Kiely them made a joke and called the press “a public trust”  insisting that “most people who own news organizations understand” that they aren’t designed to serve the owners, but rather to serve the general public.

Nobody laughed.


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