Speaking of worthy journalistic standards, do not look for them in the recently announced campaign of Michael Bloomberg for the Democratic nomination for president.
His campaign announced that his own news outlets — the ones big enough to have made him a billionaire 55 times over — will not cover his campaign for the presidency. Oh, and to be fair, he piously intoned, his news outlets won’t cover the campaigns of the other Democratic candidates, either. But they will cover President Trump and his campaign. You know, just to be fair.
There is a phrase for this: separate but equal. Except that just as long ago the Supreme Court, not to mention common sense, declared that one education for whites and one education for blacks was not equal, so, too, Bloomberg news outlets. One type of coverage for the Democrats and one type for the Republicans are separate and unequal.
Needless to say, the appropriate approach is not for the Bloomberg outlets to stop covering Trump, but to cover all the Democratic candidates openly and fairly, including Bloomberg himself. This is done all the time. Major news outlets report on their owners. We’ve seen it recently with the NPR and the Wall Street Journal. If Bloomberg’s outlets can’t do so, Bloomberg may be disqualified for the presidency. The president of the US is not to treat his associates and businesses professionally any differently from others. Yet this is exactly what Bloomberg’s restrictive journalistic-business decision does.
Is not President Trump criticized for not divesting himself of control over all of his business enterprises? What kind of campaign for the presidency, which says it is based on a new ethic, a different standard, do we have in Michael Bloomberg? As if returning the unprofessional favor, Trump’s 2020 campaign said it will no longer allow Bloomberg News reporters to cover Trump campaign events.
A plague on both approaches.
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