Bloomberg punished a reporter who wrote about the cover-up surrounding Joe Biden’s age by cancelling a PR rollout of her own show on the television network.
Olivia Nuzzi, who also works for New York Magazine, wrote a bombshell article titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” which exposed how Democrats and those close to the president worked to hide his physical and mental decline from the wider public.
After publishing the article, Nuzzi was the subject of an attack campaign by Democratic officials and activists, who demanded that Bloomberg cancel her new interview show, Working Capital with Olivia Nuzzi.
Semafor reports:
Bloomberg quietly killed a splashy PR rollout of Olivia Nuzzi’s new show, Working Capital, in response to a small Twitter campaign against the journalist by Democrats.
The interview show, announced with great fanfare in July, wound up being unceremoniously released on Bloomberg’s television network and is available online. But Max reports (and Nuzzi confirms) that plans for a higher-profile rollout of the Bloomberg Originals bet were abruptly scotched after a Nuzzi article about the “conspiracy of silence” around President Joe Biden’s age.
Her article prompted a group of Democrats on Twitter to call her a racist and tweet at Bloomberg demanding she be fired. They based their claims on some tweets from the Obama years which, if you had no sense of humor or hadn’t been following United States politics at the time, could be understood out of context as being expressions of furious anti-Obama sentiment. (They were, in fact, Twitter jokes. This is too dumb to explain in detail, but here’s a representative sample.)
Nuzzi, meanwhile, said she was "disappointed" by the decision:
When I write something that agitates the right, I am accused of being a liberal activist. When I write something that agitates the left, I am accused of being a conservative activist.
The difference is that mainstream media organizations tend to ignore bad-faith campaigns against reporters led by the right. I have no illusions about massive corporate media entities and their tolerance for even the faintest murmurs of a PR crisis, so I can’t say I was surprised, but I was disappointed.
In short, Bloomberg would rather their broadcast talent keep their mouth shut than work on journalistic exposés of the Democratic Party.