John Aravosis writes on the AmericaBlog that Bloomberg News reporter Dan Golden suggested a potential quote for a source, investment banker Mark DeFusco, when a story he was working on about for-profit educational companies was being edited.
“But as I said, let’s put that potentially huge, undivulged, conflict of interest aside. Now what if Bloomberg’s reporter, writing critical stories about the future competition, told its sources what specific critical quotes it wanted for the story — literally telling the source what to say?”
The e-mail that Golden wrote to DeFusco can be found here. In the e-mail, Golden wrote, “I’d love it if you could come up something on the record that might reflect some of this — perhaps along the lines of — Phoenix’s original model was magic because XXX — but the current model has some of the same flaws that have dogged other for-profit schools — X and Y.”
Golden, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was hired earlier this year by Bloomberg. He is an editor at large in the Boston bureau who previously worked for Conde Nast Portfolio and The Wall Street Journal.
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Full disclosure: I worked at Bloomberg and I know and respect Dan Golden.
As I understand, the for-profit education venture, which is being run by Lex Fenwick and is unconnected to the news operation, is a seminar/trade show operation, not a for-profit college, so it is NOT a competitor to the business Dan has investigated (brilliantly). In fact, those businesses are potentially customers for the new Bloomberg venture, which makes Bloomberg's willingness to delve into their operations even more courageous. (And I wonder if Dan even knows about the new venture -- I only found out about it by accident).
As for the "quote structure" allegation, well, you guys are showing your lack of understand of how to handle OTR sources. It's TOTALLY de riquer to try to convince people who've given you OTR info to go ON the record. And there's NOTHING wrong with helping them craft something for the record that will be a distillation of what they've already told you OTR.