This post has been updated.
After a bombshell report that Michael Bloomberg ordered his journalists to stop attacking fellow New York City billionaire Donald Trump, New York Magazine corrected the record to show the directive went out to opinion columnists, not reporters.
NYMag’s Gabriel Sherman added an update to his story Thursday evening “to clarify that the directive referred to columnists at Bloomberg View,” the opinion and commentary section of the news company.
After the post was updated, the magazine added another lengthy update to Sherman’s story Friday morning pointing out that Bloomberg View has continued to publish stories that are critical of Trump:
Since publication, several Bloomberg View employees have pointed out that Bloomberg View has published articles critical of Trump. This aligns with Bloomberg’s own changing views on Trump. Nevertheless, last year a Bloomberg View editor removed a critical phrase from at least one article because Bloomberg didn’t want to publish anything that could be construed as a personal attack on Trump.
Sherman’s story originally said that Bloomberg journalists’ stories about the Republican presidential frontrunner were subject to “special scrutiny” after Trump had a “scathing letter” complaining about negative coverage hand-delivered to the former mayor’s home.
Reporting that Bloomberg himself was interfering with news coverage was a serious allegation against the news organization, which has faced lingering questions about its coverage of the former mayor’s political aspirations.
Fox News recently condemned another Sherman story about Fox chief Roger Ailes spurning Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as a work of “fiction” and dubbed the magazine’s veteran politics reporter “Shermanonymous.”
Oh, that’s much different. Opinion columnists can’t voice their opinion about Trump if it’s negative. Nothing at all wrong with that…
With media tycoons like Bloomberg and Moonves, it’s no wonder Trump is where he is.
What good is it to be a billionaire publishing magnate if you can’t dictate terms of your operations’ coverage? It is as American as apple pie, tax havens and graft & corruption.
Honestly, I think it is much different. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to their own facts.
Josh is well within his rights to manage the opinions that are posted by the staff here at TPM. But he’s got an obligation to make sure that the journalism conveys the truth to readers, as it is understood by the journalists. TPM does that. Outfits that don’t do that aren’t really doing proper journalism.
Do you honestly think that a directive like that to opinion columnists, who are putatively paid to express their own opinions, doesn’t have a profound impact on how the “straight news” people do their job?