Bloomberg probably fires reporter whose story it probably spiked

It sure is getting crowded under the Bloomberg bus.

The latest man overboard and underfoot is Beijing correspondent, Michael Forsythe, who tweeted this morning that he has left Bloomberg News, just a few days after the business pages reported that he had been suspended.

The suspension came a week after the New York Post, The New York Times and Financial Times reported that Bloomberg had spiked one of Forsythe’s stories, for fear that it would get the business-news giant booted from the People’s Republic. (Bloomberg insists that the story is still active; The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has a good piece on the difficulty of covering China.)

It’s difficult not to infer from Forsythe’s suspension and departure that Bloombergcarried out a quick and dirty witch-hunt after the spiking allegations appeared in the papers. It would not be the first time.

Earlier this year, Jared Keller, then Bloomberg Businessweek’s head of social media, was sacked after a disgraced Reuters employee leaked direct messages in which Keller complained about his job. (Keys was exacting revenge on Keller for leaking another private conversation.)

Keller landed on his feet (he’s now with Al Jazeera America), and Forsythe will doubtless do likewise—his work in China won four awards last year. But if Bloomberg continues to readily throw qualified and competent journalists under the bus, it will quickly find there is nobody left to jettison.

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