Bloomberg is the only news site I can recall that ever hooked me with a teaser offer. I signed up for one of the publication’s deep discount introductory subscription rates two years ago because the trial subscription didn’t automatically balloon to the regular price. To continue reading Bloomberg when my trial period expired, I had to sign up and agree to pay the full subscription price.
Having access to Bloomberg proved a journalism luxury I couldn’t live without. My $34.99 monthly Bloomberg subscription was very much a luxury, as it represented more than the monthly cost of all my news subscriptions combined. Apple News+ is a Starkman Approved deal; for$12.99 a month, I gain access to the content of more than 400 magazines and newspapers. Bloomberg posts some of its content there.
The automotive industry is among my interests, and Bloomberg’s global team of auto writers reigns supreme, although the Reuters automotive team under the leadership of former Wall Street Journal reporter Joe White gives them an impressive run for their money. Most of Reuters’s content I can access for free.
Bloomberg’s Keith Naughton, my former colleague at the Detroit News in the mid-80s who covers Ford, quite likely has more of a historical knowledge of that automaker than CEO Jim Farley. David Welch, who covers GM, has done a stellar job covering the myriad failures of GM under CEO Mary Barra, although notably he always stops short of calling out her questionable leadership. Gabrielle Coppola in Bloomberg’s Detroit bureau, and Amy Stillman, who covers business in Mexico, do stellar work.
Hannah Elliott, who notably covers the lifestyles of the affluent, two years ago wrote a delicious takedown of the electric Cadillac Lyriq, warning the vehicle wasn’t worth waiting for, counsel others clearly agreed with. In 2022, GM reported that 233,000 people had “expressed interest” in buying the SUV, yet as of August of this year GM had only delivered 22,370 of them. Good thing, too, because GM in August recalled all its Lyriqs because of problems with the braking system that could result in a crash.
Watching paint dry
Most people would find Bloomberg boring, about as exciting as watching paint dry or watching the company’s founder, Michael Bloomberg, give a talk on climate change. For the record, I’m a big fan of Mike Bloomberg, as I perceive him as a decent man, a great philanthropist of worthy causes, and I admire that unlike Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg didn’t build his fortune on the backs of U.S. taxpayers.
Bloomberg media is very much in Mike Bloomberg’s image, and his media company’s lack of flash is what appealed to me. I prefer reading insightful stories that broaden my understanding of the world and keep me well informed.
Bloomberg’s enterprise stories often don’t get the pickup they deserve because the corporate media today prefers to focus on “scoops,” particularly if they relate to Elon Musk. An example of admirable Bloomberg enterprise reporting was its story about CVS’s branded drugs being recalled at twice the rate of rival Walgreens by Anna Edney and Peter Robison. As a former buyer of CVS over-the-counter branded drugs, the story was of far greater interest to me than Elon Musk’s alleged behavior while receiving massages on his corporate jet.
Another stellar example of Bloomberg’s enterprise reporting was this story by Sheridan Prasso and Jessica Brice published in February 2023 tracing much of the aluminum in Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning pickup to a refinery in Brazil accused of sickening thousands of people. Ford relies on aluminum to keep the Lightning light and give it speed. The story called attention that EVs aren’t necessarily better for the environment when the mining hazards of their materials are taken into consideration.
Monster scoop
In recent months, I became increasingly wary of Bloomberg and began doubting my uncritical admiration of the publication. The tipping point was the tweet below posted last May by Bloomberg’s former senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs that 39 persons within the secret service had signed a petition warning of incidents resulting from “inadequate training,” a “double standard” in disciplinary training, and “potential insider threats” that could pose a threat to national security.
Jacobs had one heck of a scoop, validated two months later when Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a sniper because of the sorts of lapses that Secret Service insiders supposedly warned about. Curiously, Bloomberg never published a story elaborating on Jacobs’s exclusive.
Jacobs was fired in August and publicly held out to dry for allegedly breaking a Biden/Harris administration mandated news embargo on the release of several American prisoners held by Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. In a memo sent to the outlet’s staff and leaked to CNN, Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait wrote that an initial Bloomberg story reporting that Gershkovich had been released as part of a historic US-Russia prisoner exchange was posted “prematurely.”
Bloomberg’s reporting “could have endangered the negotiated swap that set (the prisoners) free,” Micklethwait wrote. “Even if our story mercifully ended up making no difference, it was a clear violation of the editorial standards which have made this newsroom so trusted around the world.”
Micklethwait reportedly took disciplinary action against other staffers and launched an investigation to make certain such “failures like this don’t happen again”.
I’m doubtful that an experienced reporter like Jacobs, who worked at Bloomberg more than eight years, knowingly violated a news embargo and was willing to risk jeopardizing Gershkovich’s release and the ensuing consequences. If she did, I imagine it was because she caved under the pressure from her bosses, looking to ensure that Bloomberg was among the first to report the story when it broke. Moreover, Bloomberg reporters can’t post their own stories. The news organization admirably has a layer of experienced editors overseeing reporters who more talented and accomplished than most rival publications.
Questionable news embargo
Lost in the corporate media’s coverage of Jacobs’s firing was how the Biden/Harris administration was willing to jeopardize Gershkovich’s release to generate and maximize positive media coverage just months before the presidential election. The Wall Street Journal’s editors impressively worked to secure Gershkovich’s release, and that publication was entitled to an exclusive and could be counted on not to break it. Instead, the Biden/Harris administration briefed a host of reporters from other publications about the rescue activities before they were completed.
If you are looking to keep something off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, the last people you tell are scoop hungry, click generating reporters from the corporate media.
I have no insight to suggest Jacobs’s firing was even remotely related to her Secret Service scoop, but the optics are ugly: A reporter who scooped the corporate media with an exclusive and disturbing story about the Biden/Harris administration’s ineptness protecting a popular presidential candidate was fired for allegedly violating a White House PR initiative. Reading the coverage of Jacobs’s firing, I didn’t come across even a peep of protest from her former colleagues, even anonymously.
Erudite leader
Micklethwait is the rare erudite leader in U.S. journalism, albeit one who hails from across the pond. According to his bio, he studied history at Oxford and later authored six books, most recently The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State. Micklethwait was editor of the Economist before it morphed into the woke publication it has become, and in 2010 was named Editors’ Editor by the British Society of Magazine Editors. He is a trustee of the British Museum.
Watching Micklethwait’s recent interview of Donald Trump at the Chicago Economic Club, I was impressed with his polish and his understanding of economic issues. To his credit, Micklethwait began the interview acknowledging that Kamala Harris had declined an offer to discuss her economic platform. The results wouldn’t have been pretty watching the word salad queen being interviewed by a refined and articulate business journalist.
Micklethwait’s bio says he oversees editorial content across all Bloomberg platforms, including opinion. I wonder if he spends much time reading the opinion section because the left-wing commentaries are rarely illuminating or persuasively well argued. In the months leading up to the election, some of the commentaries were just rehashes of Democratic National Committee talking points.
Final straw
Election morning it was my intent to avoid reading corporate media election coverage because I knew it would anger me. I blame the corporate media for the appallingly poor candidates, and I didn’t want to read any more of their lies. Readers of the New York Times, viewers of MSNBC, and other consumers of corporate media were assured the race was close, but I was mindful of a comment by Nate Silver, a prominent pollster who previously worked at the Times, who said on a podcast that pollsters were deliberately skewing their results to make it appear the race was tight and too close to call.
LinkedIn didn’t want to leave me in peace. The lead item in my feed was a post from Tim O’Brien, Bloomberg’s senior executive opinion editor, linking to his rant about why Trump was unsuited for another four years in the White House. O’Brien has good reason to despise Trump because the president-elect harassed him for years with a despicable $5 billion lawsuit, alleging O’Brien in his book TrumpNation damaged The Donald’s reputation with the disclosure that Trump wasn’t the billionaire he claimed. An appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that Trump’s lawsuit had no merit.
I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, but O’Brien blew his credibility when he cited and linked to a letter signed by what he called “a bipartisan group of more than 1,000 senior national security leaders” who said they were endorsing Harris because Trump was a threat to democracy.
“Where Vice President Harris is prepared and strategic,” the national security leaders wrote, Trump is “impulsive and ill-informed.”
Reading that more than 1,000 national security experts had bandied together to warn about Trump, I immediately recalled some 50 former spooks warning in 2020 that the New York Post’s “laptop from hell” story implicating Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s controversial affairs was likely “Russian disinformation”. Even the New York Times later admitted that the Post’s reporting was true, albeit 17 months after Biden was elected and firmly ensconced in the White House. The FBI confirmed during Hunter’s trial in June the authenticity of the laptop’s contents.
How would the national security experts know that Harris was “prepared and strategic” given that she bungled the few media interviews she granted? O’Brien possibly believed that when Harris appeared on The View, or met with Alexandra Cooper, the Call Her Daddy podcast host best known for her segment on oral sex, the vice president revealed some profound insights that only national security experts could decipher.
O’Brien’s Trump diatribe didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and certainly wasn’t worth paying $34.99 a month to read. The commentary triggered a memory of my late uncle Sydney, who worked in book publishing when I was a graduate journalism student at Boston University. Uncle Syd was aghast how much time I spent reading newspapers and periodicals and turned me on to a book by the philosopher Mortimer Adler called, How to Read a Book.
Adler’s book, first published in 1940 and co-written by Charles Van Doren who later became embroiled in a quiz show scandal, was predicated on the argument that people with worldviews shaped reading newspapers and magazines were “learned fools” because they knew lots of facts but lacked the knowledge and context to understand and interpret them. Reading books was required to make sense of the information, Adler and Van Doren maintained. I often wonder what they would think of people who get their information from TikTok or X.
Charlie Gasparino’s wisdom
Charlie Gasparino’s Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America served as an excellent validation of Adler’s premise during the presidential election season. In his book, Gasparino explains how corporate America’s embrace of wokeism was politically driven by the Obama and Biden/Harris administrations and persons with ties to them.
I learned from Gasparino’s book that an organization called the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a much-feared LGBTQ+ rights group that’s been hugely successful shaking down corporations for donations, is run by a former Obama aide. Vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spoke at this year’s HRC annual dinner, and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden spoke in previous years.
Reading Gasparino’s book, I gained some valuable information about billionaire Mark Cuban, one of Kamala Harris’s most high-profile surrogates. Cuban is typically referred to as a successful tech entrepreneur. According to Gasparino, Cuban made his wealth from Broadcast.com, a website he founded that streamed audio from sporting events and talk radio. Cuban sold his site for $5.7 billion to Yahoo, which eventually shut the site down. The sale, according to Gasparino, is regarded by tech analysts as among the worst deals ever consummated by a major publicly traded company.
Readers of Gasparino’s critical portrayal of Cuban likely were wary that he was one of Harris’s most aggressive advocates. Cuban is no Elon Musk, one of Trump’s loudest champions.
I’ve cancelled my Bloomberg subscription, realizing an annual saving of $419.88 – money that I will reallocate to buying lots of books and making the time to read them. That, of course, will result in significantly reducing the time I spend reading corporate media. I suspect that will help lift my sour and cantankerous mood these past few months.
So long Keith, David, Gabrielle, Amy, Hannah, Peter, Sheridan, and Jessica. I will miss your great reporting, but I no longer feel good about the publication where your insights appear. Your owner, Michael Bloomberg, confirmed my decision in his editorial today slamming Democrats for concealing President Biden’s decline.
As the owner of a news organization with some of the most talented journalists in the country and one with a sizeable Washington bureau, Mike Bloomberg should be asking himself why his team of reporters never reported on Biden’s decline, which I knew about for years reading supposedly far right publications “spreading misinformation”.
Just a hunch, but I’d wager Jennifer Jacobs, Bloomberg’s former senior White House reporter, knew about Biden’s decline. Mike Bloomberg would be wise to investigate why she and no one else in his Washington bureau wrote that story.