Bloomberg News punts on candidate Bloomberg and Dems, but not Trump

Back when he was New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg routinely feuded with the press over his whereabouts.

He doggedly refused to release his weekend schedule, even if he was traveling out of town, favoring his own privacy over the public’s right to know.

Now, as of Sunday, he’s running for president. But one organization that won’t be covering him aggressively is Bloomberg News.

This is a journalistic giant, churning out 5,000 stories a day, some of them market-moving. Bloomberg News has 2,700 journalists spread across 150 bureaus around the globe, along with a television network, a magazine and those extremely lucrative Wall Street terminals.

But after the 77-year-old billionaire jumped into the Democratic race, the news service’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, issued an edict to his staff.

“We will continue our tradition of not investigating Mike (and his family and foundation),” the memo said. And that prohibition would extend to his rivals in the party because “We cannot treat Mike’s Democratic competitors differently.”

So everyone from Biden to Bernie to Booker to Bloomberg is off-limits for investigation.

But its team “will continue to investigate the Trump administration as the government of the day.”

If you wanted to come up with a policy that would seem to favor Bloomberg and his re-adopted party—he ran for mayor as a Republican—while disadvantaging the man whose job he wants, it would be hard to beat this.