A report from NPR today says that six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government.
The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.
In 2012, Mike Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China’s ruling classes.
The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation, but Bloomberg News published the story anyway.
Forsythe pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders’ ties to the country’s richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters’ sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In emails sent back to Bloomberg’s journalists in China, senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement. And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran.
Audio obtained by NPR shows that editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler says the story was killed because “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. So, I just don’t see that as a story that is justified.”
In late 2013, Bloomberg News suspended Forsythe, accusing him of leaking word of a controversy to other news outlets. The company would later fire him.
In leaving the company, he signed a nondisclosure agreement that bars him from speaking publicly about his time at Bloomberg News. Others from the China investigative team would leave the company in the years that followed, each having first signed an agreement not to disparage the company. In at least one case, a journalist signed the nondisparagement deal in part to prevent the loss of a month’s pay.
Lawyers for Bloomberg News pressured someone else to sign a nondisclosure agreement: Forsythe’s wife, author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher.
“They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife. I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being.”
They threatened to force Forsythe and Fincher to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars spent to move their family to Hong Kong after death threats they received after Bloomberg published the first article.
Bloomberg also threatened to sue to make the couple pay the company’s legal costs, pushing the dollar amount well into the six figures.
“There was no reason why I should have to sign a nondisclosure agreement,” Fincher told NPR, “because I didn’t possess any damaging material about the company.”
“They assumed that my husband would be able to silence me,” Fincher says. “He didn’t want to do that. That’s not the kind of relationship that we have.”
It was revealed in the story that after the first investigative project ran in 2012, the Chinese authorities had searched Bloomberg’s news bureaus, delayed visas for reporters and ordered state-owned companies not to sign new leases for Bloomberg’s primary product: its terminals.
The terminals are the lucrative basis of Mike Bloomberg’s personal fortune — recently estimated at more than $50 billion, making him one of the richest people in the world. Subscribers pay $20,000 annually for each terminal, which provides specialized financial data and analysis.
If Bloomberg makes its money on terminals, it gains prestige and greater name recognition from its news division. Many of its stories, predominantly on business and finance, appear first on the terminal.
Greta Van Susteren retweeted about the story and wondered “if other news orgs had huge financial interests in China” too.
This is important story..would also like to know if other news orgs had huge financial interests in China: “After Killing Investigation, Bloomberg News Sought To Silence Reporter’s Wife : NPR
This is important story..would also like to know if other news orgs had huge financial interests in China: “After Killing Investigation, Bloomberg News Sought To Silence Reporter's Wife : NPR @davidfolkenflik https://t.co/7jSfgTBmxk
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) April 14, 2020
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