Bloomberg Law has retracted this article, published on Sept. 3, that focused on social media posts from Department of Labor official Leif Olson.
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post writes, “A note to staff from Editor in Chief Cesca Antonelli strikes some of the same notes, pledging to strengthen ‘policies and processes.’ According to the top editor, the retraction comes at the end of protracted review: ‘We received several complaints about our story. We took the complaints seriously and have spent the last few weeks reviewing our coverage and our editorial processes. We addressed these issues with all staff involved. The last of our review meetings was conducted yesterday afternoon.’
“Perhaps Antonelli was so specific about the review meetings because of the quirky timing of the retraction. On Thursday afternoon, attorney Ted Frank, head of litigation at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, posted the results of a FOIA request that he and the institute’s Frank Bednarz had submitted:
🔥 🔥 🔥@blaw refused to answer my questions about their abusive journalism fail on the Leif Olson story, so we FOIA’ed Penn’s emails to DOL to see how it happened. As you can see, this was a total hit job, @benjaminPenn truncated & mischaracterized the Facebook posts. pic.twitter.com/CzTsMKWUBN
— tedfrank (@tedfrank) October 3, 2019
“David Peikin, director of corporate communications for Bloomberg Industry Group, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that the retraction’s timing was ‘unrelated’ to the FOIA release.”
Read more here.
