Why the Bloomberg scandal is overblown

Heidi Moore, a U.S.-based business journalist for The Guardian in London, breaks down the Bloomberg snooping scandal and concludes that it’s much ado about nothing.

Moore writes, “So it’s important to separate some key points, around this: were Bloomberg reporters illegally or unethically using the information available to them? And if so, did it drive their journalism? What is the pragmatic effect of the terminal quasi-scandal?

“On the first point, there seems to be no evidence of unethical behavior from reporters, at least. It’s easy to see that if the information was made available to Bloomberg reporters as part of their work tools, they wouldn’t question its use. Wall Street, which uses every available bit of information itself, understands this. As one Wall Street trader put it to me: ‘it’s not difficult to understand why someone with access to that information would use it. Bloomberg captures everything.’

“On the second point – that of driving journalism – it’s likely that the claims of a Bloombergian information monopoly are highly overblown. Any decent financial reporter would be dubious that Bloomberg reporters could have gained much high-quality journalism from the terminal alone. There’s no evidence that really valuable scoops – such as those on mergers and acquisitions – could have come from mining terminal information. Despite the hype, the information available from the terminal was poor relative to what a reporter would need to actually construct any kind of useful story. It could provide leads, perhaps, but not replace the hard work of reporting.

“Bloomberg’s genuinely award-winning journalistic work – on health reform and other issues – was based on shoe-leather reporting and did not and could not have come through mining the terminal. Amusingly, JP Morgan complained that Bloomberg reporters used terminal information to judge that some traders had been let go after the London Whale debacle. Bloomberg also first reported that the multibillion-dollar London Whale trade even existed, which is a much bigger and more important story, and was clearly not information that could be gathered from a terminal.”

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