Yesterday morning I was wondering why I hadn't seen any new reporting about the prisoner swap the previous night. Charlotte Klein has the answer:
For days, various media outlets had been aware — through their own reporting and as information trickled out elsewhere — that a prisoner swap involving American journalists and dissidents was in the works. But news organizations were asked by the White House to hold their stories until Gershkovich et al. were in U.S. custody. Until then, the prisoners would still be in Russian captivity, and officials feared that any attention brought to the fragile deal could risk compromising it — not just for the U.S., but for the multiple other countries whose prisoners were freed as part of the swap.
Apparently everyone agreed to this (very normal) request except for Bloomberg, which published a report early in the morning when the American hostages boarded a plane in Russia and then followed it up ten minutes later with a football-spiking tweet bragging about their "scoop." Now everyone is pissed at them for breaking the embargo and potentially endangering the deal.
And for what? To beat other news outlets by a few hours on a story all of them had? Sheesh.
Brand-building you know! Clicks! Ad revenue!
The American corporate model selects for sociopathic traits, and these days, that model is exalted above all else. Exhibit A: the former President. Frankly I'm surprised more of them didn't do it.
I read this somewhere:
"If a monkey hoarded more bananas than he could ever eat, while other monkeys around him starved, naturalists would study that monkey to figure out what the hell was wrong with it. But when a man does the same thing, he gets his picture on the cover of Forbes."
'k, nailed it -- everybody else can go home now.
Thank you, Parrots. I see the quote attributed to Nathalie Robin Justice, and searching that name mainly returns references to the quote. Pithy.
Greed over the safety of others. Glad I don't read them and never will!
In the UK (and some other places) they use D-Notices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Notice
But those are all namby pamby liberal cesspools where they don't believe in Freedom and Liberty and the right to compromise people.
Bloomberg News, owned by the man who thought two terms as mayor of NYC was enough for Giuliani but not for him and apparently enough for anyone after him. Is it any wonder his paper thinks the rules don't apply to them?
The obvious thing to do is publicly scold them.
The clever thing to do is to "leak" a fake story to them with a request to keep a lid on it--and to no one else-- and when they report it, let them look like fools.
They don't care. They'd get the clicks, they'd get the eyeballs, and any embarrassment would be forgotten quickly. And even IF that degraded the CORPORATE brand slightly, well, that's next quarter, or the one after, or maybe never, but this is THIS quarter.
It's myopia and bad faith all the way down.
Reminded me of that WW2 Chicago Tribune story that leaked that the Navy had broken the Japanese code:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/10/28/1942-tribune-story-implied-americans-cracked-japanese-code-documents-show-why-reporter-not-indicted/
jealousy over the 2020 democrat primary results?
Yeah, really bad form. The White House is within its rights. I believe, to pull Bloomberg’s credentials or freeze them out in some way until after the election. SPJ, IRE and other journalism groups will protest. But what does Biden care? He’ll be gone in a few months anyway. And the rank and file journos won’t mind if a group that burned them is punished.
….. Journalism justifies its place in American society by earning the public’s trust that it has society’s best interests at heart . If the exchange had fallen through because of Bloomberg (good thing the only thing Trump reads are the ingredients on a bucket of KFC), the disaster would have added to the not so stellar record of American journalism in recent decades.
This "scoop" nonsense has annoyed me for years.
In the past, when newspapers were where people got informed, a scoop was a story one paper broke while the other competitors hadn't. And it stayed that way, not for a few hours, but many hours - until the next day's press run.
Since about 1980, the press - especially the electronic press (TV, Internet) - breathlessly report that their team scooped the competition by as little as a few minutes. That is meaningless in terms of eyeballs and ad revenue. It's a holdover from an earlier time when news was printed, and quick updates were near-impossible.
the wojbomb piece.