UNREAL: Bloomberg News Agency Killed an Anti-China Story, Then Fired the Journalist Who Wrote It and Harassed His Wife
Shane Trejo
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It has been revealed that Bloomberg News shuttered a story that would have exposed the wealth of the communist politburo in China, fearing reprisal from the totalitarian country, NPR has revealed.
In 2014, Bloomberg News killed the story and then took further measures to silence the primary reporter responsible for doing the research. They even went after the wife of the man who wrote the report.
“They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife,” the author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher said to NPR. “I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being.”
Fincher’s husband is journalist Mike Forsythe, who is now a reporter with the New York Times. Before he was hired by The Times, he formerly worked for Bloomberg News as their Beijing correspondent. He led a heralded investigation into the wealth of the Chinese ruling elite back in 2012.
Bloomberg News stood strong against pressure from Beijing and the objections of the Chinese ambassador in 2012 to run Forsythe’s story. He was forced to move with Fincher to Hong Kong after reporting the story after receiving what he interpreted as death threats through third parties.
Despite the threats, Forsythe was undaunted in exposing the Chinese regime. He rushed headlong into his next story exposing their wealth and hypocrisy. The next chapter of his saga regarding Chinese corruption focused on Wang Jianlin, the nation’s most wealthy man, and the family of Xi Jinping, who was recently appointed to the role of Chinese President at the time.
At first, Bloomberg editors in New York City were thrilled with the juicy story. But shortly afterward, the story was killed. Fincher said that her husband was baffled at the time as to why this would happen.
“Mike and some of the other reporters and editors who had been working on this story just were asking for answers about … why was this story killed?” Fincher told NPR.
Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler finally weighed in on the controversy in October 2013 during a private conference call. NPR received the audio of the call and transcribed it for their exposé.
“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. “So, I just don’t see that as a story that is justified.”
“The inference is going to be interpreted by the government there as we are judging them,” he added. “And they will probably kick us out of the country. They’ll probably shut us down, is my guess.”
In late 2013, Forsythe would be fired after being accused of leaking details of the censorship to the public. He signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), and Bloomberg News reportedly tried to coerce his wife into signing an NDA as well. They threatened to force them to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in relocation and legal fees unless she signed.
“There was no reason why I should have to sign a nondisclosure agreement,” Fincher tells NPR, “because I didn’t possess any damaging material about the company.”
In 2015, Forsythe’s research would eventually be published with the Times. Former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been accused of abusing NDAs to silence his victims throughout the years, and it is well-known that the billionaire is very friendly toward China.
Bloomberg is on the record defending China’s authoritarian and anti-democratic government:
Billionaire oligarch Michael Bloomberg funds many anti-gun groups in America with his vast fortune, and a recent public statement he made in favor of the Chinese Communist Party may explain the motives behind his anti-constitutional activism.
Bloomberg, who was the New York City Mayor before Bill de Blasio, appeared on PBS Firing Line to discuss climate change policy and other topics. Bloomberg gave China a pass for building a great deal of coal-fired power plants across their country.
“The Communist Party wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public. When the public says ‘I can’t breathe the air,’ Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive,” Bloomberg explained.
Bloomberg made this claim despite the fact that laws were changed last year in China to allow Jinping to become lifetime President. Xi’s name and political ideology were even enshrined into China’s constitution. Any debate and discussion about the move was censored at the time by Chinese enforcers.
After host Margaret Hoover questioned his comments, Bloomberg continued to defend Xi and the responsive nature of the authoritarian Chinese communist system.
“No government survives without the will of the majority of its people… He has to deliver services. The Chinese Communist Party looks at Russia and looks for where the Communist Party is, and they don’t find it anymore, and they don’t want that to happen,” Bloomberg explained.
Hoover continued to push-back against Bloomberg’s responses, but Bloomberg was undaunted and kept doubling down on his defense of Chinese communism.
“And there’s always in government, even governments that aren’t what we would call a democracy, there’s lots of stakeholders who have a vested interests, and they have an impact,” Bloomberg said.
“And that’s why, if you listen to the young millennials, ‘let’s go in and solve the problem overnight.’ Yeah, that would be great if you didn’t have to fund it and get it through legal things,” he added.
China’s rise in the West has been enabled by power-hungry oligarchs like Bloomberg that are happy to do the bidding of the red menace to pad their pocketbooks.
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