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Bloomberg editor quits over China story

Bloomberg News editor Ben Richardson has quit the organization in protest of the editors’ handling of an investigative piece on China.

“I left Bloomberg because of the way the story was mishandled, and because of how the company made misleading statements in the global press and senior executives disparaged the team that worked so hard to execute an incredibly demanding story," Richardson, who served as editor-at-large for Asia news, told Jim Romenesko on Monday.

The story in question was written by reporter Michael Forstyhe, who left Bloomberg for the New York Times after anonymous Bloomberg employees revealed that top editors did not publish Forstyhe's investigative article on Chinese elites due to fears that Bloomberg would be expelled from the country. Bloomberg relies heavily on sales of its financial data terminals in the country.

Late last week, Bloomberg LP chairman Peter T. Grauer said publicly that the company should have reconsidered publishing critical articles about Chinese President Xi Jinping because they harmed Bloomberg's bottom line.

Richardson said Grauer's comments were frank and that they "illustrate the frame of mind of senior management from the business side" at Bloomberg.

"Clearly, there needs to be a robust debate about how the media engages with China. That debate isn’t happening at Bloomberg," Richardson said.

"The sad thing about this is that a small group of incompetent and self-serving managers have screwed things up for everyone else," he said. "I spent 13 years at the company, as did Mike [Forsythe]. I worked with some fantastic people who did and continue to do great work."

Richardson also gave Romenesko some insight into how the story was pulled, noting that "the reporters who worked on the story for months didn’t get to review the copy before it was unilaterally spiked on a conference call with a ludicrous amount of top brass."

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.