Categories: OLD Media Moves

Bloomberg Businessweek apologizes for cover

Dylan Byers of Politico is reporting that Bloomberg Businessweek has apologized for a cover on the real estate market that some deemed racist.

Byers writes, “‘Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret,’ Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, wrote in a statement sent to POLITICO. ‘Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.’

“The cover depicted minorities in a house, drowning in cash. The headline: ‘The Great American Housing Rebound: Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?’

“Slate blogger Matthew Yglesias, who otherwise praised Businessweek as ‘a genuinely great magazine,’ described it as ‘racist.’

“‘The idea is that we can know things are really getting out of hand since even nonwhite people can get loans these days! They ought to be ashamed,’ Yglesias wrote on his blog.

“The Atlantic’s Emily Badger wrote, ‘[W]e still can’t decide what’s most offensive about it: the caricature of the busty, sassy Latina, the barefooted black man waving cash out his window, that woman in the upstairs left-hand corner who looks about as dim-witted as her dog?'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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Worden Report says:
May 14, 2013 at 12:15 am
In http://www.thewordenreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/bloomberg-news-speed-journalists.html, I argue that breaking the firewall to exploit the conflict of interest at the expense of the subscribers is unethical. Less obvious, relying on the firewall was also unethical, not to mention negligent. We need to take structural conflicts of interest in business and government more seriously.