Bloomberg News to return to ‘normal coverage of election’ after founder drops out

Bloomberg News will return to its typical election coverage after the company’s billionaire owner Mike Bloomberg dropped out of the Democratic presidential race Wednesday. 

“Now that Mike has said he is leaving the race for President, we will return to our normal coverage of the election; we will follow exactly the same coverage rules for the Democratic presidential candidates and President Donald Trump,” Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait told Bloomberg editorial and research staff in a memo shared with The Hill. 

The news outlet had said after Bloomberg entered the race in November that it would refrain from in-depth investigations of its owner and his Democratic rivals.

Bloomberg ended his campaign Wednesday morning after a disappointing finish on Super Tuesday, when he made his ballot box debut after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad buys across the country. 

Micklethwait commended the Bloomberg News staff on the “independent way that we have reported the race.” 

“As I pointed out back on November 24th, we found ourselves in an unprecedented situation: no other newsroom of our size has had to deal with anything similar,” he wrote. “Since then, we have written around 1,100 articles on the contest – and that does not include all the broadcast pieces and interviews, nor all the third party articles we have made available to our terminal customers.”

Bloomberg News has an updated audit of its election coverage that was published Feb. 3.