Some news outlets are upset with Bloomberg's reporting:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bloombergs-risky-embargo-breaking-evan-gershkovich-scoop.html
How did Bloomberg beat The Wall Street Journal and the rest of the press corps on one of the most-watched stories in the world: the release of Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan from Russia?
At 7:41 a.m. on August 1, Bloomberg published its scoop about the prisoner swap. Ten minutes later, a Bloomberg editor posted proudly on X, “It is one of the greatest honors of my career to have helped break this news. I love my job and my colleagues.” Then, 8:59, the piece was updated to read: “An earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect that the Americans have not been released yet.” The Journal itself didn’t report it until just after 11 when their reporter and other Americans — whose freedom was negotiated by the U.S. Government as part of an extremely complicated, 24-person swap across multiple countries — actually deplaned in Turkey.
According to multiple sources at the Journal and other major outlets, the Bloomberg scoop left journalists and government officials fuming. With a prisoner swap, you don’t know if it’s going to happen until it happens. (As one Journal reporter put it: “We literally had Yaroslav Trofimov on the ground with binoculars waiting to see Evan come off the plane, and we pubbed as soon as that happened.”) Which means that Bloomberg’s story proclaiming Gershkovich was free was inaccurate, given that the Russian plane was still in the air at the time of publication. That plane could have just turned around and gone back to Moscow, which is why the Journal and other publications had agreed to hold off.
“Incensed” is how one reporter, whose outlet had agreed to an embargo – delaying publishing what they knew – reacted to Bloomberg’s decision. “People are very, very disappointed in Bloomberg. And not just the embargo breaking, but the football spiking.” (The Bloomberg editor’s X post was later deleted.) Another reporter added, “We all want to break stories. We also need to consider the risks of breaking those stories. I hope editors and reporters thought long and hard about the risks of revealing the details of a hostage transfer before the hostages were back in U.S. custody.”
