
After killing investigation, Bloomberg News sought to silence reporter's wife - kyleblarson
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/14/828565428/bloomberg-news-killed-investigation-fired-reporter-then-sought-to-silence-his-wi
======
floatingatoll
The article that Bloomberg refused to publish, that was later published at
NYT, is here (no prior discussion at HN):

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-
jianlin-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-
abillionaire-at-the-intersection-of-business-and-power-in-china.html)

~~~
jolmg
Off-topic, but I decided to finally make that free account NYT insists on, and
NYT returns the error "Please enter a valid email address." It's a
@fastmail.com address with no weird characters. Anyone else had that trouble
before? Even more interesting is that just changing the domain to a personal
one that uses one of the new gTLDs makes it work. I would have maybe expected
the opposite to happen. Are they blacklisting Fastmail?

~~~
danso
It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother
blacklisting Fastmail – isn't Fastmail a paid service (i.e. less likely to be
used by freeloaders, or by people making throwaway accounts)?

In any case, no matter how much they want to squeeze money out of new users,
the NYT has more incentive to _not_ have a super strict blacklist, or overly
onerous sign-up process. Signup numbers are still metrics that a company vice
president/middle manager can brag about, and NYT's initiative of mandating
free registration seems much too new (e.g. as a comparison, they had totally
free access for more then a decade, then a leaky paywall for several
additional years) for them to already have hard enforcement policies in place.

~~~
jolmg
> It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service)
> bother blacklisting Fastmail

If it's not a blacklist, I think it'd be even stranger for it to be a
whitelist, precisely for the reasons you mentioned. mzkply's comment makes me
think that it might have to do with Fastmail's email aliases, which is the
closest thing they have that's like Mailinator (an email provider that _is_
frequently blacklisted for signups), but I don't think it's similar enough
that this makes sense.

I agree with everything you said about NYT's incentives, but that leaves the
question raised by this experience.

I opened up a chat with NYT to ask about it, but I was left waiting for an
agent there for an hour before I decided to just close the chat.

------
drtillberg
One could write this article about Bloomberg ... or one could write this
article about China. I think the China part of the story is more relevant and
newsworthy at this point, considering how things have unfolded in the years
since. The news company probably didn't decide all on its own to pursue this
remarkable effort to kill a story that had not much to do with itself.

~~~
seneca
Indeed. Making the headline here about Bloomberg smells of the exact kind of
tiptoeing around the CCP that the article discusses. The real story here, and
probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western
institutions by the Chinese government.

~~~
phkahler
>> The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and
subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.

...with the full cooperation of western corporations.

~~~
smooth_remmy
...and the full cooperation of the western elites and the government.

~~~
yibg
Probably because elites in china enjoy a huge advantage, and elites in the
west would want that kind of advantage. If you got the power and money in
China, with the right kind of connections you can literally get away with
murder.

~~~
yters
Or CCP is a shell for communist westerners to try out their social experiments
on other nations. Communism is itself a western import to China, not an
indigenous worldview.

~~~
carapace
I've got to congratulate you. I've been a conspiracy nut for decades but I've
_never_ heard _anyone_ suggest that the Chinese Communists are a front for
Western control.

* slow clap*

But no. Study the history of the Middle Kingdom. They invented totalitarian
bureaucratic central government centuries ago.

~~~
yters
Well, communism is not indigenous to China. It is a western idea imported by
western educated Chinese intellectuals, who then indoctrinated Mao.

Whether the western control is direct or indirect, it is indisputable that the
CCP is not an indigenous movement. It is a product of western ideological
imperialism.

As a very visual example, go travel around China, visiting areas with greater
and lesser CCP control. The less the control, the more elements of traditional
China are around. The greater the control, the more it looks like a replica of
yet another Western metropolis.

I saw this very clearly when visiting Xinjing province near Tibet and hiking
through the villages. The normal part of the village has traditional, hand
made housing, beautiful craftsmenship, great food. Then, on the outskirts of
the villages, were towering, empty apartment blocks. The CCP planned to move
the villagers out of their traditional homes into these huge apartment blocks
they could more easily control.

So, yes, most clearly the CCP is a product of the west, not ethnic Chinese
culture.

~~~
carapace
Your earlier comment sounded to me like you were saying that current Western
communist elites are somehow controlling the CCP, and that's why they are
going along with "the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the
Chinese government." But that doesn't make sense to me because there aren't
any Western communist elites anymore, are there?

But if you're just pointing out the Western origin of the foundations of
Chinese Communism them, yes, I agree the whole thing could be seen, from the
POV of the West, as being confronted with a kind of social/political prodigal
son. I'm so used to thinking of communism as an Eastern thing, but you're
right (again).

~~~
yters
There aren't any obvious communist elites, but there is a weird whitewashing
of communism going on. And, a communist china fits the purposes of capitalist
west quite well. So, I would say if there are western elite controlling China,
they are doing it for personal gain, not ideological.

~~~
carapace
> There aren't any obvious communist elites, but there is a weird whitewashing
> of communism going on.

Well the CCP is stumping hard on the propaganda front. They've shoved the
Dalai Lama out of the spot light, etc., and they're working hard to influence
Western media, and IMO too many are happy to go along with that to make money.
Don't get me started on tech companies. I just don't think that there's a lot
of secretly pro-communists in the West.

> And, a communist china fits the purposes of capitalist west quite well.

How?

> So, I would say if there are western elite controlling China, they are doing
> it for personal gain, not ideological.

Ah but isn't that true of all elites globally? I'm not trying to
"whataboutism" here, I just assume that most if not all elites are
ideologically agnostic.

~~~
yters
The Chinese government seems more than happy to exploit its people for western
money, up to strip mining their citizens' organs.

------
tynpeddler
Aside from Bloomberg's scummy behavior, this story highlights the eternal
dilemma of journalism. To write good stories, you need access to the subjects.
But if the stories make the subjects look bad, you lose access.

Coupled with the fact that newspapers don't always make a lot of money these
days, and often rely on wealthy benefactors that make their money in other
ways, you can end up in an awkward spot where one wrong story can damage a
newspaper's base of information but also it's financial foundations. I don't
think there's any good answer to this question.

~~~
briandear
They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people
here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone
here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link.

A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is
that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as
PR organs for the constituencies they “cover?” The idea that you have to be
nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means
is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories
from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing
Xinhua-approved stories isn’t journalism, it’s PR. It’s not different than
publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get
kicked out, that still doesn’t preclude covering China — it just makes it
harder — but it’s already hard, so there isn’t any difference. By letting
China dictate coverage, that’s worse than no coverage at all since only an
approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are
inclined to accept that “truth” without challenge because
$some_international_media_outlet reported it.

China’s obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes
this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP
official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting
that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn’t human-to-human transmissible even after they
knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for
human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn’t happen. Even
more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free
speech.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
>They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people
here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone
here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link.

As a paid subscriber of several digital-only newspapers, I only want them to
publish their news as publicly as possible, so I _and others_ can know better.
Walls don't help.

When we stop pretending that the news must be rarified to be of value, then we
may start supporting actual journalism for what it does best: investigate and
publish, instead of sell the news as a product. So as the readers, we should
support them, not buy them.

------
tren-hard
Did Bloomberg change his opinions on China when they OK'd the "The Big Hack"
in 2018?

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-
big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-
amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond)

The controversy that unfolded from that was massive.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-
wemple/wp/2018/10/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-
wemple/wp/2018/10/22/your-move-bloomberg/)

~~~
valuearb
You would think they would have fired the reporters who faked that story.

~~~
duxup
Did they fake it? Or were they mistaken?

~~~
lobotryas
Are you asking if there is evidence that it was intentionally wrong reporting?

No, AFAIK there was no such evidence.

Are you asking how, in good faith, such a factually wrong story could have
made it to publication?

We also don’t know.

Are you asking why BB has not retracted it after being called out multiple
times?

Maybe hubris, maybe profit motive.

At the end of the day, why would we trust anything BB publishes about China?
They have Terminal licenses to sell and they don’t want to jeopardize their
market.

~~~
duxup
Yeah that's pretty much what I was asking.

It was a weird story with weird reactions from the companies involved ... but
at least I never ran across anything that explained how the reporting played
out / if there was anything 'faked" or anything like that.

The whole thing seems to not have many answers.

------
duxup
It really brings home the importance of freedom ... elsewhere.

It seems like a very real likelihood that China would choose to track people's
sentiments about China elsewhere ... and at will pressure outside companies to
remove or simply not hire people who they wish to punish / discourage.

Post a winnie the pooh pic / are on the list? Good luck...

~~~
ceilingcorner
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King
Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, 1963

Pretty apt for our global society, too.

~~~
birdyrooster
This argument is one that the left fails to make perennially. That improving
the conditions of one necessarily improves the conditions of all and that
policy that focuses on the most vulnerable helps everyone more still.

The left will win Wall Street (and thus elections) when they finally show that
social programs provide mitigation allowing Wall Street to minimize losses and
a multiplier to increase their earnings.

~~~
jmeister
Agreed. The left should learn from the Trump campaign, who put a positive,
constructive spin on a fundamentally anti-establishment platform. Trump’s MAGA
vs. Bernie’s angry finger-pointing

~~~
8bitsrule
So much to learn there. It's clear who the beneficiaries of that fraudulent
platform are. Quite similar to China's tack, isn't it?

~~~
jmeister
You can admire some aspects of the campaign/platform without agreeing with the
people/policies.

------
eric_b
I was a long time Bloomberg Businessweek subscriber until last year. Starting
around 2017 China started taking out multi page ads at the beginning of each
issue. (Or at least that's when I noticed).

The editorial slant became predictably sympathetic to China as well. So much
so that by the end when I canceled my subscription there were many outright
pro-China propaganda pieces.

Interestingly the editorial slant also went much further left, politically.
Not sure if the two are related.

~~~
jxramos
Is that somewhat unprecedented to have a government post ads in a publication
which are not related to spreading the word about hiring or something. What
exactly did those full page ads have as content?

~~~
adequateness
I dob't know if it is the same content but China Daily, a daily newspaper
owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, has
purchased full page ads in American news papers that look like news articles.

[https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed-
la...](https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed-law-to-
publish-propaganda-in-ny-times-wapo/)

------
buckminster
Plain text version:

[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428)

------
dahdum
> "They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the
> wife," author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher says. "I was just an
> appendage of their employee. I was not a human being."

I understand she sees it that way, but I keep coming to the exact opposite
conclusion. They knew she was a respected journalist with enough clout to be
heard and a riveting story of fleeing Beijing for fear of their lives. They
were clearly afraid of her as an individual.

I'm not defending Bloomberg, but I don't see any easy answers here. Publishing
the second investigation would (in their estimation) have shut down all their
reporting in China, put more reporters in personal risk / fleeing, and
significantly hurt their core revenue.

------
a3n
Maybe we should rethink this idea of billionaire presidents.

The proposition is that their immense wealth makes them immune to pressure and
corruption.

To the contrary, they have much, much more to lose than any normal citizen.

What would President Bloomberg, or any other billionaire president, sell us
out for to protect their pile and its increase?

------
neycoda
I'm not an alt-righter but the news media seems almost as corrupt as our
politicians.

~~~
93po
It's almost like they serve the same people

~~~
nameless_me
The far right and far right behave similarly -- except the language used
differs.

~~~
mirimir
It's not one dimensional.

------
adelHBN
China has been kicking out Western news reporters from highly respected
organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost. See article:
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-
wo...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-working-for-
the-wall-street-journal-new-york-times-washington-post-whose-press-
credentials-end-in-2020-11584464690)

~~~
dntbnmpls
> highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost.

Highly respected by whom? And I believe it was in response to Trump's ban on
chinese journalists.

[https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist-
associa...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist-association-
blasts-us-visa-limits-69427974)

It's not shocking that we'd ban chinese state propagandists and china would
ban US state propagandists. It's silly to allow enemy propagandists in your
country during a trade war.

------
bbgthrowaway
I was kind of close to Forsythe's first investigation was published and his
next one was silenced. The New York Times's similar, and subsequent,
investigation into Wen Jiabao's corruption gained it a Pulitzer in 2013.
Bloomberg journalists widely and correctly thought that the Pulitzer process
showed a clear bias toward the NYT in favoring the paper's derivative work on
an outgoing politician, rather than the trail-blazing work on the man who is
now China's leader.

Here's some context: In 2013, after decades of reporting, Bloomberg News had
never won a single Pulitzer. It ate at Winkler. One of the reasons Bloomberg
employed Forsythe and funded the investigations of him and his team was in
pursuit of that prize. The news organization and the company showed a lot of
courage in publishing Forsythe's first investigation. And it suffered huge
economic consequences. Its terminal sales to banks in China slowed
considerably after that.

Bloomberg won its first Pulitzer two years later, in 2015, for a series of
explainers on corporate tax inversions. That was after it had re-organized and
some would say eviscerated the projects and investigations team that Forsythe
worked on.

[https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg-
get...](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg-gets-its-
first-pulitzer/)

What Bloomberg realized, of course, as Bezos has realized with the Washington
Post, is that owning a real news organization makes doing business
complicated, because the best news stories contain information that someone
wants to keep quiet. Bloomberg News has learned to toe the line on China, and
that should scare people. It's a microcosm of how China intimidates
individuals and businesses (and non-profits like the WHO) around the world.

------
LatteLazy
I am very confused by the events and timeline detailed in the article.

Bloomberg (Edit: Bloomberg News) published a story on the Xi family wealth in
2012 and were banned for it. But this article says they were still
investigating and writing that story in 2013. And that they buried it. And
that they did so to avoid upsetting the CCP etc.

They even have quotes:

"late Oct 2013":

>"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."

Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that
bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for
already publishing this story!?

Has someone just massively screwed up their dates?

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship-
bloomber...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship-
bloomberg/bloomberg-sites-blocked-in-china-days-after-xi-family-wealth-story-
idUSBRE86306820120704)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China)

There is a lot to discuss here:

* The extent that spouses' activities effect employee NDAs

* When and whether NDAs are appropriate both in Journalism and other industries

* The CCP and Chinese governments abuse of economic powers to silent dissent, in this case internationally and US and other governments compliance with that policy.

* Connections between wealth and political power, both in China and the world

* Whether being part of the larger Bloomberg entity strengthens BBG News or makes them more liable to external pressure

I also think Winklers position (assuming it was his position, since apparently
all this happened after it had already happened?) was very sensible:

>Winkler alluded to that in his remarks. "There's a way to use the information
you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in
the process and wipe out everything we've tried to build there," he told the
reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story.

Aka: we can't publish this as we do too much business there, but we could leak
it to someone else without the same exposure

Sadly the article seems to make a bad job of covering the basic facts and it's
can't help but quote emotional projection instead of giving clear outlines of
events. Good luck with this one (gender non-specific) guys!

~~~
vonmoltke
> Bloomberg published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned
> for it.

...

> Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that
> bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for
> already publishing this story!?

No, the Bloomberg News websites were blocked. Bloomberg News reporters were
not thrown out, Bloomberg Terminal sales were not terminated. Blocking the
websites is a far cry from "kick[ing] us out of the country".

~~~
LatteLazy
>After the first investigative project ran in 2012, the Chinese authorities
had searched Bloomberg's news bureaus, delayed visas for reporters and ordered
state-owned companies not to sign new leases for Bloomberg's primary product:
its terminals.

That would make some sense, though it seems like they were pretty damn close.

So why not mention the 2012 article and set all this in its context?

The story here is "Once bitten twice shy", so why mash it up so badly I can't
tell if they've been bitten already or they're hesitating after the bite.

And why open it all with quotes like "I was not a human being"?

It's like the intro to a story about sexism has been pasted in instead of the
intro to the story about CCP censorship then someone hit publish without
proofing it.

------
rdtsc
> Last month, a Bloomberg corporate spokeswoman told The New York Times that
> Forsythe stole "Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property and gave it to his
> wife." The spokeswoman, Natalie Harland, said that Bloomberg LP and
> Bloomberg News never pressured anyone to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

The good ol' we never pressured we just warned we'd harass them to no end and
ruin their lives.

It was rather entertaining to see an old billionaire who rarely hears "no"
from those around him being put on the spot during the primary debates by
Elizabeth Warren. All those millions spent on his advertising campaign didn't
help, and there were no lawyers and PR spokespeople to draft responses for
him.

Yeah, he eventually agree to release a few women who had NDAs signed if they
requested. I think one might have gone through the process. But I can see
being afraid to go through the process since a week later they could be sued
for other things like "stole Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property" and then
having to sell their homes to defend against it.

It's just so bizarre how he got any support at all. Look at the things he was
saying: "...and that upon learning that a female employee was expecting a
baby, he responded: Kill it!" from
[https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg-
no...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg-
nondisclosure-release/index.html)

~~~
kelnos
> _It 's just so bizarre how he got any support at all._

I mean... Donald Trump is our president, so if Bloomberg gaining any support
is bizarre, we've already been in bizzaro world for the last 4 years.

It's not like the Democrat side of the house is squeaky-clean when it comes to
its candidates not doing shitty things.

~~~
rdtsc
> Donald Trump is our president,

Good point. And I am thinking people who supported Bloomberg are the ones who
protested for the last three years then a decent amount of them turn around
and follow another old white billionaire from New York as a viable candidate.
Not only that one with who was telling his employees to kill their babies.
You'd think 3 years would be plenty to come up with well ... someone else.

~~~
kelnos
Yeah, I find it incredibly bizarre that the DNC can't field a decent slate of
relatable, electable candidates, even if you "only" consider the massive
number of politicians with experience on the national stage. But I guess they
are more incentivized to get their friends into positions of power than to do
right by the country and party (though I assume they've convinced themselves
that what they're doing does indeed fulfill that duty).

------
chx
It's interesting how this is the same Bloomberg who have published the
completely fake "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S.
Companies" story.

------
jackfoxy
From Alcibiades
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades)
to Michael Bloomberg, it's always the elites who sell out their country. Of
course it's only the elites who have have something of value enough on that
scale to sell. Love of country is for the hoi polloi.

------
rhegart
I vehemently disagree with the blatant partisan lean of almost every news
company, but this crony, spineless cowardice is a far greater sin in my
opinion.

------
worik
I do not understand why any body would think that Bloomberg could do political
stories in China. I do not understand why Bloomberg would be embarrassed about
spiking political stories in China.

I am not defending the press and political climate in China, but it is what it
is. The Chinese make up their rules. Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions
of dollars in business for the sake of some political journalists work? I am
glad they got their story published - good work. But Bloomberg would be
_insane_ to publish it.

~~~
Chris2048
> Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business

Maybe they shouldn't. But for that reason, maybe they shouldn't be in the
Journo business?

------
moron4hire
How does it work for an NDA to gag people over criminal activity?

------
everybodyknows
>"It has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method that is
... smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who
are in front of us and behind us everywhere," Winkler said, according to the
audio reviewed by NPR and verified by others. "And that's who they are. And we
should have no illusions about it."

NPR's publication of this will surely lead to CCP pressure against Winkler,
who will see him as a spy intent on leaking reportage out through other
channels. And the world may lose still another channel of factual info out of
China.

One wonders how NPR management rationalized inclusion of this particular quote
as being in the public interest.

------
brenden2
You can't trust "the news" anymore. Everything is just clickbait doomsday
nonsense every day. It's incredibly hard to separate fact from fiction,
opinion from fact, and reality from fantasy.

~~~
save_ferris
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think we generally expect too much
from media outlets. Readers also have a responsibility to understand the
context of what they're reading, and that's been true for as long as
newspapers have existed.

Take everything you read with a grain of salt, know that a story might later
be retracted or edited, and follow different outlets with different
perspectives. I think the homogenization of media consumption is far more
dangerous than the fake and false stories that get out.

~~~
34679
Seems reasonable enough to expect the following:

Five Core Principles of Journalism

1\. Truth and Accuracy

Journalists cannot always guarantee ‘truth’, but getting the facts right is
the cardinal principle of journalism. We should always strive for accuracy,
give all the relevant facts we have and ensure that they have been checked.
When we cannot corroborate information we should say so.

2\. Independence

Journalists must be independent voices; we should not act, formally or
informally, on behalf of special interests whether political, corporate or
cultural. We should declare to our editors – or the audience – any of our
political affiliations, financial arrangements or other personal information
that might constitute a conflict of interest.

3\. Fairness and Impartiality

Most stories have at least two sides. While there is no obligation to present
every side in every piece, stories should be balanced and add context.
Objectivity is not always possible, and may not always be desirable (in the
face for example of brutality or inhumanity), but impartial reporting builds
trust and confidence.

4\. Humanity

Journalists should do no harm. What we publish or broadcast may be hurtful,
but we should be aware of the impact of our words and images on the lives of
others.

5\. Accountability

A sure sign of professionalism and responsible journalism is the ability to
hold ourselves accountable. When we commit errors we must correct them and our
expressions of regret must be sincere not cynical. We listen to the concerns
of our audience. We may not change what readers write or say but we will
always provide remedies when we are unfair.

[https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/who-we-
are/5-principles...](https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/who-we-
are/5-principles-of-journalism)

~~~
jb775
This sounds ideal but in my opinion is far from reality.

------
bt1a
Spent a few minutes trying to decipher why Bloomberg would go through such
hoops to silence his own wife.

~~~
dang
We've changed the title above to that of the HTML doc, which fits the 80 char
limit.

(Submitted title was "Bloomberg Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter Then
Tried to Silence His Wife", which I'm sure was cut to that to try to fit the
limit.)

~~~
roosterdawn
This issue comes up a lot. As a sibling comment says, if it is so common an
occurrence for the character limit to lead to misleading headlines because
they were overly condensed, you may want to consider slightly expanding the
headline length limit (perhaps to 120-140). But I appreciate that it's a
balancing act, because making it too long dilutes the punchiness of the HN
front page itself. No easy answer here.

~~~
dang
It comes up somewhat regularly but it's quite rare for there to be a case
where there isn't a natural solution. For example in this case the HTML doc
title not only fit the limit nicely, but was more neutral and thus better for
HN. I think HN benefits from this limit.

------
djrogers
I've seen it here in small amounts before, but it's rather shocking to observe
so much obviously biased downvoting and flagging in one story. A number of
anti-CCP posts already dead, and others on their way...

I suppose it's rather predictable that people can't post something about the
CCP on a meta-story about the CCP killing news stories, without their posts in
turn being killed.

~~~
pwned1
I came to this thread to observe the same behavior, without any plans to
comment, expecting any comment that is even mildly anti-CCP to be heavily
downvoted. But I just had to second your own observation at the peril to my
own karma.

~~~
phkahler
Fortunately we dont live in a country where you online karma is relevant.
Yet...

~~~
Der_Einzige
What do you call your credit score?

~~~
jmeister
False equivalence. Credit scores measure failure to honor financial contracts.
They’re not about honoring arbitrary social norms

------
JPKab
I've personally found that saying critical things about the Chinese Communist
Party on this website results in people quickly conflating said attacks on a
government with a non-existent ethnic group (ignoring the fact that China has
multiple ethnic groups instead of just the dominant Han majority) and suddenly
you are flagged for being a bigot. It's pretty obnoxious behavior that is very
dominant in Silicon Valley. I view it as primarily driven at the bottom by
people who see all bigotry through a purely Western lens (and are therefore
blind to the fact that "white" privilege is actually "dominant ethnic group"
privilege and changes depending on where you are), don't know anything about
China other than it being an Asian country, and equate criticizing the country
as being Western imperialism.

From the top, it's money money money, because hey, who cares about Uighurs
anyway, I just got a billion from some dude whose dad fought for Mao and is
now a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party. Now I'll go talk
about how much I value diversity while my company is funded by a country which
imprisons people because they are Muslim, or criticize the government, or, you
know, tell the truth.

~~~
eloff
This is a disturbing trend I've seen on the left. Any criticism of a foreign
country is construed as racism, or talk around immigration policies. That's
obviously conflating issues, and it serves to shut down conversation rather
than promote it. I hope people stop being so woke and wake up to the harm
they're causing with that kind of extreme attitude.

~~~
lostlogin
> This is a disturbing trend I've seen on the left.

It’s not just the left, it’s both sides, and often there have been incidents
of actual racism that can be accurately cited as prior examples of racism.

~~~
eloff
I haven't seen this on the right, I think the left is far more guilty of
invoking racism falsely. The right tends to be guilty of actual racism
sometimes.

------
coliveira
Let's not forget that this company published the largest fake news about China
that one could conceive:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-
big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-
china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies)

I haven't seen any retractions of this piece of garbage that has been denied
by any and all Western companies that were supposed "victims".

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Sorry, where is the refutation to this?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Apple and Amazon produced detailed statements[1] explaining that they never
found what the reporters say they found. And nobody has yet produced any
concrete evidence of the spy chips existing; no example, no picture, no
documents referring to them. It's impossible to definitively refute anonymous
claims that some secret thing exists, but I think it's unreasonable to believe
them.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-
den...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-deny-servers-
chinese-spy-chips)

~~~
redis_mlc
> this company published the largest fake news about China that one could
> conceive

Was this particular article based on evidence? We don't know.

Was it 100% plausible and done by governments all the time? Absolutely.

Are IPMI, BMC and managemnt engines complete garbage from a security
standpoint? Absolutely.

So I find the strong language very over the top. If you know the history of
weakening security equipment, then you wouldn't even bat an eye over this.

You know how bad Zoom security is? It's actually 10x better than any IPMI or
BMC code. I'd get worked up about that, which is on every server motherboard
already.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Sorry, yes, I didn't mean to give a misleading impression. It's very plausible
that a government might intercept hardware in this way. I'm just skeptical of
this specific way (there's got to be a subversion both easier and less obvious
than planting a magic spy chip), and don't believe that Apple and Amazon would
issue such strong denials if they had in fact found such a chip.

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
My eyes have been open to China’s influence in _US media_ , especially with
covid-19 outbreak, where they’re rallied various institutions to change the
narrative around the name and origin of the virus.

For example, Dreamworks carrying water for the CCP government by including the
9-dotted line prominently on a map in their movie[1].

Who thinks this inclusion was by accident? Their influence in US media and
politics is out of control.

1\. [https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks-
movie-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks-movie-
vietnam-ban-south-china-sea-map-2019-10)

~~~
jxramos
It's somewhat amusing all the fuss over the legitimacy conveyed through maps,
as if the map illustrator consulted some gold standard reference of truth.
There was a time some centuries past when maps were approximations of reality.
I think this comes down to the play on human nature of: when you say something
frequently enough it's assumed to be true. Where is the relevant international
law assuming there is one that expresses territorial waters.

~~~
handedness
It may not convey legitimacies, but it often reflects realities such as the
one illustrated here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE)

Maps often illustrate who owns whom, and how.

~~~
carapace
Wow.

> When asked about Taiwan, WHO Dr. Aylward first pretended not hearing then
> awkwardly cut the line

They call him abck and ask about Taiwan again and he literally says, "well,
we've already talked about China. ... when you look across all the different
areas of China ..."

