If the front page story today in the NYT is right, Bloomberg has made a craven decision that calls its larger credibility into question. According to the Timesarticle, Bloomberg managers in New York decided to squash stories by their (aggressive) China-based reporters for fear of angering the Chinese government. The less-damaging rationale for this decision is Bloomberg’s concern that its reporters might be kicked out of China. The more-damaging suspicion is that the company was worried that it would lose subscribers in China for its cash-cow Bloomberg financial terminals.
This is part of a much more widespread pattern of making it hard for international journalists to get into China.
This is not the way a confident, big-time government behaves.
