Bloomberg News Is Said to Curb Articles That Might Anger China
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sadly, this is the future of news. No news organization can today afford to antagonize one of its largest (potential) markets simply to strive for some higher journalistic zeal.
Take Google for instance. Does anyone today care that Google stood its ground against the Chinese government and squandered the entire country away to competitors? Whatever halo they earned when they made that decision has long vanished.
Edit: Morals and halos don't pay journalist salaries.
Yes, me. It's the single factual act of Google's history that sticks in my mind. It says to me someone near the top will lose revenue to make an ethical stand. I can't remember too many other concrete examples of this in large companies.
Google abandoned China because the Chinese government was hacking and stealing its technology, rerouting its traffic to homegrown and government-subsidized competitors like Baidu, and generally making the value of the market not worth the hassle. Google wanted to do business in China, but basically it couldn't. The government's demands to censor and monitor search results were just icing on a tall, thick cake.
To whatever extent Google based its decision to cede the Chinese market on ethical principles, that's wonderful and to be commended. But ethics probably had 10% to do with it. Principal always drives principle.
In the same vein, can the moral gains for Bloomberg from running these two stories outweigh the monetary/reporting freedom losses that will come too?
Maybe someone can get away with not doing the right thing once or twice and still be viewed as an overall ethical person, but just because they do the right thing once or twice does not earn them that honor.
The company has been trying on and on again to get into China somehow, Sandberg has been on the record saying "China's the big one" (she talked a lot about it in the Charlie Rose interview from some time back), Zuck himself I think was scheduled to give China another visit but those plans were presumably scrapped in the post-NSA-leaks environment.
Now more than ever, it is clear that no American social networking media company will ever have substantial market share in China. The Chinese government will never let it fly, it's as simple as that.
A free market in Internet companies in China is not possible until regime change in China. I think a change in government in China to a post-communist system is moderately possible, although various geopolitical trade-offs have caused this to take longer in China than it did in most parts of eastern Europe. The bubble economy in China makes it likely that there will be internal pressure there for regime change when the bubble pops.
Transitions in other Asian countries from authoritarian (which is what China is right now) to democratic governments typically coincided with the populace reaching a certain level of wealth and education.
I don't see that level being reached in China any time soon because the sort of accelerated export-oriented growth that worked in other Asian countries won't work when you have more than a billion people. China is still very far from the levels of wealth and prosperity in Korea or Taiwan when they transitioned to democracy.
I'm pretty sure the main reason is that his wife is ethnically Chinese. For business purposes, a translator is more than sufficient. And from what I remember, he gave this up after a year of private tutoring because he wasn't getting anywhere - you really have to make a big time commitment to learn a language like Chinese.
Wikileaks isn't motivated by making a "profit", other than its immediate needs for survival. As for "leaking", it's already been one of the main sources for "investigative journalism", it's just that in the past it was more of a "push" thing from journalists, to try and get the classified documents, and in the future it will be more of a "pull" thing, where the leaks will come to them, and they just need to figure out what's the story from them.
This is especially important when media entities can't have "boots on the ground" anymore, and they need to be a lot leaner - blog-level leaner. And it's all good as long as they keep their integrity, which ultimately is what really matters about a news agency, no matter how small or big, and we can already see most, if not all, of the media entities have become corrupt already, so it's not like we should put our trust in the big news agencies only anymore.
I expect Greenwald's news agency to be very successful if they have a document leak platform on the site, and promote it very well, and put it front and center on the site, because now everyone knows Greenwald has integrity, so a lot of future whistleblowers will coming to him, because they trust him, just like Snowden did.
The real, government-breaking stories of the future, will be coming from small/lean news agencies that have a very high-level of integrity. However, we, the people, also need to push for much bigger whistleblowing protections, unless we expect every whistleblower from now on to literally throw away their lives for us, which is really quite an unreasonable expectation, even from most potential whistleblowers.
While some companies - most notably Google - do the right thing against their own interests, you are right that this isn't something that can be expected of profit driven corporations in general. That's exactly why governments should act.
But we can all do somthing to make it clear this is unacceptable:
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /
User-agent: QihooBot
Disallow: /I don't think we should make this into a battle between East and West, as the nytimes has framed it here, it is a battle between corporate and state interests and those they govern, over who owns the news, which to a large extent defines the limits of our thought. That happens in every country, and with every sufficiently influential news org.
I'm not in favor of a large scale trade war or boycott. But in this very specific instance, where one company - Google - has been thrown out of China for taking a stand, and another company with global ambitions benefits from it, I think blocking the latter is not disproportionate.
(I'm not in any way affiliated with Google. In fact, Google is one of my main competitors)
Not to mention the past and present of news, in most cases. One reason I enjoy reading the Economist is that they seem to take a peculiar glee in describing the scissoring-out of their articles by the authorities in various places, from China to a US prison.
I am not simply saying this as an observer. I am saying this as someone who is impacted by the choice google made.
We are an Android shop based in US with 20% of revenue coming in from India. I am sure if Google didn't make that choice, 30% of our revenue today would have been from China (which today is less than 1%). We are happy we lost that 30% revenue for better human rights.
It's ironic that the news media has advanced so far in attempting to mold themselves as some sort of aloof and apart institution, some form of abstract art with no holds to the mundane world of everyday lives and things. And yet at the same time they have become such big business that they are plugged into, and often complicit with, so many of the power structures of the world.
The difference between this and Google is that whether or not Google operates in China, the world outside of China is not affected. People everywhere else still get the same search results. But if Bloomberg decides that it's better to report less negatively in English to its audiences in the whole world in order to make a profit from the Chinese market, it's not the Chinese audience, but the outside world that's gonna be hurt.
Yeah, but at some point in their behavior, you kinda have to stop calling them "journalist" salaries.
This is the past of news too.
'I needed money' is a poor excuse for unethical behavior.
The future?
Well, it is. Because if the US Government would have had a firm stance on protecting Freedom of Speech then the cost-analysis for Bloomberg would be - it is not worth pissing off the US Government.
This might not be a popular opinion, but I honestly think that its not possible for a for profit news organization to be fair and balanced. Specially in todays world when news organizations are owned and operated by a few to drive public opinion.
Ideally news organization should either be donation funded and non-profit. When you start caring about maximizing page-views and start pushing for more profit per pixels, its stops being journalism.
You can consider buying a newspaper a donation.
Actually what you suggest already has been tried in various forms, the outcome being stuff like indymedia, but also others. The problem you face here is that having no ads in your news usually means having no money for:
marketing, getting out your stuff. A lot of things are already know anyway somewhere, just that person isn't loud enough or nobody cares.
lawyers, if you don't want to do just public relations then you will need lots of them.
reportages, that often require a lot of preparation, going to other countries, hidden cameras, tons of other equipment, etc.
fallback money in case something goes really bad.
It's sad, but it feels a bit like if there were enough donating people for serious news then the world would already be better and require it way less.
Also you saw the Wikileaks drama. I can be kinda rough.
But I don't have to read it to know that profit-seeking corporations often kowtow to the various forces that could negatively affect that profit.
Bloomberg has a thing with the totalitarian Chinese regime. The New York Times does favors for the Obama administration. Probably both of them do a lot of bootlicking for their advertisers.
That's why free society needs numerous media outlets, and the legal freedom to report the truth. Because there isn't any obligation for them to report all of the truth, and there isn't any feasible way to force them to do so anyhow.
But at least when we have a bunch of them, the pot will call the kettle black, and remind us how they work.
So before you listen to what anyone says about anything, check to see who pays the bills. I've found it to be a highly effective filtering strategy.
On one hand, some courageous Chinese men and women risk everything for freedom and fight their government. On the other hand, it is sad to see these rich American businessmen collaborate with the Chinese autocrats (even though these American businessmen don't need to fear torture etc and the only risk they run is losing some extra money by not being to conduct business in China)
The same has in lets say Europe, where news don't dare to talk badly about the US or Russia. It's a really common thing. Nobody wants to be the reason for diplomatic troubles and everyone knows how childish all over the planet can act
Sometimes causing that trouble simply doesn't seem worthwhile (even though one really should say that it would their job), maybe also because a lot of them is pretty clear and not surprising in first place. In a world where society wants to be passive (and yeah, even if the startup folks like to exclude themselves we always need point at examples that aren't really part of the startup culture) the motivation to criticize another, economically important country or even your own country isn't exactly high. Sure people might agree and say that they not like it, but changes of policies are pretty much non-existent.
Like when people here on HN decide not to criticise, say, Tesla, Musk, Linux, open source, etc because they know they will get voted down?
Or where politicians don't properly investigate or voice issues with the likes of the NSA because they simply don't know what dirt they have on them?
Or don't criticise presidents who start wars on lies because they are called unpatriotic or anti American?
No. I don't like it one little bit either. But frankly, people with something to lose are rank cowards. People taking the "coin", worse.
Bloomberg News is in an interesting position that other news companies would never get in to. In the article it mentions Bloomberg is already having trouble in China due to previous articles they wrote and "sales of its financial terminals to state enterprises have slowed." Bloomberg has a near monopoly status on this aggregated financial information. If a company, public or private, chooses not to buy them they are put at a competitive disadvantage (assuming its not being used to spy on them; as private citizens we face this same challenge with some of the online services we use.)
So NYT, I'm supposed to choose 'morally' between two governments which neither give a fuck about me and from you telling us so? That's amusing.
-Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945))
Oh irony of ironies.
That type of thing is exactly why I'm glad there's a dearth of such extreme political fanaticism. In the end, a democracy will only be as intelligent as its people are educated, and even the educated can fall prey to the madness of the masses. Demagogues take control, and soon enough you have actors blacklisted as Commies, mosques being attacked, free speech "advocates" murdering dissenters, and -- maybe -- Chinese nationals being rounded up in the streets.
No thank you.
Radicalism is like a knife. In bad hands or minds it will surely do more harm than good, but giving up on it altogether isn't wise. Especially when you are a good guy and refuse to be radical in your efforts to spread good.
Why don't use actual real-life cases of similar people, like FDR?
Robespierre on the other hand was governing France that was on a verge of a civil war: monarchists vs. republicans/liberals/democrats. He was governing France that was in state of war with basically whole of Europe. Six foreign powers if I remember correctly attacked France at the same time trying to restore the monarchy. With monarchist in France - French people - supporting the foreign powers. You tell me there is no difference? Please elaborate.
Just about anybody could get guillotined in Revolutionary France. The time was called "La Terreur" for a reason :-)
Westernism is suffering a crisis of conscious right now. We are trading what we have fought for for things we are afraid of. Wake up, indeed.
As long as it stays as just your opinion, that's fine. But I'd have a problem with people who think they should take their opinions on morals & ethics and go force it on other parts of the world. And before anyone asks, no I'm not saying genocide should be ignored because "that's their culture." But going to another place and pointing guns in their face saying "stop being violent!" is a bad idea, imho
Actually stopping people has just been taken off the table by you. Sitting around and lamenting the state of the world is only going to make us feel better, but won't do much for people being slaughtered for their race/beliefs/orientation/whatnot.
That leaves....?
At best, your comment is a naive and ignorant take on Murdoch and China.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/asia/26murdoch.html?... for how Murdoch wooed Chinese leaders, how his Star TV man tried to stop the BBC from showing a Tiannamen Square video and how they ultimately dropped the BBC from Star TV's Chinese programming.
It's a false dichotomy, of course.