Newly unearthed audio recordings reveal how Bloomberg News spiked a 2013 corruption investigation into the Chinese Communist Party over fears it would damage the company’s rapport with the regime, attempting to silence its own journalist, Mike Forsythe, and his spouse through nondisclosure agreements. While Mike Bloomberg faced intense scrutiny during his ephemeral but expensive presidential campaign for his company’s sweeping use of NDAs—particularly in alleged sexual harassment cases—a Tuesday NPR report sheds light on how the former New York mayor’s company used similar forced confidentiality measures to hide shady internal dealings in the newsroom. In response to a November 2013 New York Times report on the muzzled investigation, Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg News cofounder and then editor-in-chief, claimed it was still active, suggesting the story lacked sufficient sourcing. Winkler also told the Financial Times at the time that “the reporting as presented to me was not ready for publication.”
However, Winkler’s calls at the time, obtained and published by NPR’s David Folkenflik, tell a wholly different story. “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 during an October 2013 conference call, held after the editor had reportedly ignored Forsythe’s initial questions. “I just don’t see that as a story that is justified.” He went on to reiterate these concerns, stating that such investigations would be “interpreted by the government there as we are judging them. And they will probably kick us out of the country. They’ll probably shut us down.” Winkler said that future reporting on Chinese ruling elites “has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method,” before warning that such articles have to be “smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who are in front of us and behind us everywhere.” (Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment to NPR).
Winkler’s fears were not without merit. Bloomberg News was already feeling the CCP’s backlash over a 2012 investigation series by Forsythe and other reporters uncovering a funneling scheme that enriched China’s ruling-class families. Facing what he believed to be death threats, Forsythe and his family made a precautionary move to Hong Kong. After the investigation ran, Chinese authorities conducted physical searches of Bloomberg News’ bureaus and delayed visa requests for its journalists. Perhaps most importantly for the brand’s bottom line, the Chinese government ordered state-owned companies to cancel new leases for Bloomberg terminals, which run subscribers around $20,000 per year, according to NPR, and make up a significant portion of the company’s revenue (and its owner’s more than $50 billion fortune).
In the Winkler recordings, he alludes to Bloomberg News’ efforts to “build” in the emerging Chinese market while explaining the motivation for cutting Forsythe’s corruption investigation, which focused in part on President Xi Jinping, who had recently assumed the party’s top leadership position. “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 concluded. As the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out on Twitter, the NPR report calls into question Bloomberg’s publicly stated distance from his namesake company while serving as mayor through 2013. “[It] gets at the reality that Bloomberg was involved in his company from afar while mayor, and while saying he wasn’t,” tweeted Haberman, who covered Bloomberg for years.