本帖最后由 choi 于 5-2-2015 12:29 编辑
Howard W French, Bloomberg’s Folly; The backstory is about to be told. Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2014
www.cjr.org/feature/bloombergs_folly.php
Quote:
"During his Hong Kong visit, according to people present, Grauer had also told the bureau there that the company’s sales team had been forced to do a ‘heroic job’ repairing the company’s relations with Chinese officials following the Xi Jinping story. He warned the Bloomberg staff that the company would ‘be straight back in the shit-box’ in China if ‘we were to do anything like that again,’ one source said.
“The [New York] Times’ investigative work also involved sophisticated forensic accounting techniques and was extraordinary by any measure, but its target of choice was China’s outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, a figure of far less power than an incoming president, whose family had been the subject of rumors of serious corruption for more than a decade. What is more, Bloomberg’s groundbreaking reporting on the Xi family came months before the Times would weigh in on the Wen clan.
Note:
(a) If you have time, you may want to read this--in part because the VOA report is somewhat based on this article, without attributing to it.
(b) Howard W French (born in Washington DC in 1958; white; associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism 2008- ; New York Times: Shanghai bureau chief 2003-2008, Tokyo bureau chief 1998-2003, bureau chief for West and Central Africa 1994-1998, bureau chief for Caribbean and Central America 1990-1994, joined NYT in 1986; native tongue in English, and fluent in Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese)
He earned BA from University of Massachusetts, and after graduation in 1878 joined his father, a doctor, who had taken a job running rural clinics for the World Health Organization in Ivory Coast. Howard French taught English at the University of the Ivory Coast 1980-1982 and then started writing as a freelance reporter in West Africa for a variety of publications. See Bio. HowardWFrench.com, undated.
www.howardwfrench.com/bio/
(c) "Like a car wreck in slow motion, the team that produced this work began falling apart. In November 2013, days after the first Times story, Bloomberg abruptly suspended Michael Forsythe, a lead writer on the China investigative work whom the company appeared to blame for leaking details about the killing of the latest project. * * * The crackup continued over the next few months. Bloomberg’s Projects and Investigation team, which had done much of the groundbreaking China work, was thrown into chaos, worsened by the resignations of two senior editors deeply involved in the projects. One was Amanda Bennett, a top enterprise editor."
(i) crack-up (n): "an accident in which a vehicle is badly damaged: CRASH, WRECK"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crack-up
(ii) crack up (vt): "to damage or destroy (a vehicle) by crashing <crack up a car>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crack%20up
(d) "Bo was on the outs with Chinese authorities. For the Chinese state, Bo was fair game."
out (n): "on the outs [phrase]: on unfriendly terms : at variance"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/out
(e) "Beaten repeatedly on the Bo story [by Wall Street Journal], Bloomberg and the Times pushed hard on the theme of corruption, both choosing one top-level political figure a piece to illustrate the problem [David Barboza of New York Ties pursued premier Wen Jiabao]. A cornerstone of the argument that Bloomberg deserved the Pulitzer that the Times eventually won is the fact that the news agency [Bloomberg] chose the most ambitious target—the highest figure in the entire Chinese political system, Xi Jinping, the incoming president, about whom little of any particularly revealing nature was previously known. 'We were having our arse handed to us, and Mike said, well what we should do is follow the money,' said Ben Richardson, the British, Hong Kong-based former editor-at-large who quit the company in March. The Mike he referred to was Michael Forsythe, the lead writer for Bloomberg of what would become its Xi Jinping story"
(i) arse (n): "variant of ASS"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arse
(ii) have one's ass handed to one: "verb phrase
To be decisively defeated <If he runs again he'll have his ass handed to him> (1990s+)"
The Dictionary of American Slang, Fourth Edition by Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD and Robert L Chapman, PhD Copyright (C) 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers
dictionary.reference.com/browse/have+one%27s+ass+handed+to+one
(A) Or "get one's ass handed to one"
(B) The "ass" may be replaced with "butt."
(f) "He [Peter Grauer] warned the Bloomberg staff that the company would 'be straight back in the shit-box' in China if 'we were to do anything like that again,' one source said. * * * It [investigation into Xi Jinping and his clan] made the [Bloomberg] senior management feel good. I think they had no idea what they were getting into, though, and it wasn’t until they had been in the shit-box [ie, subjected to Chinese reprisals] for several months that they figured it out.” (brackets original)
The noun "shit-box" is a slang for anal canal--just inside the asshole (which is "anus" 肛門 in anatomy).
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发表于 5-2-2015 12:21:02
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