Reuters kills hedge fund story after pressure

Reuters kills hedge fund story after pressure
December 21st, 2009
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Reuters editors last week killed a story by investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein about hedge fund trader Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to top Thomson Reuters executives that he was being persecuted by the news agency’s reporting, sources at Reuters said.

Goldstein’s story was an “incremental” advance in the reports swirling around Cohen that he engaged in insider trader during the 1980s, Reuters sources said. There have been reports that Cohen is next in the sights of the SEC following the Galleon case, which featured SEC wiretapping the conversations of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
Goldstein’s story was based on documents, and was approved by Reuters lawyers. After Goldstein contacted Cohen for the pro forma no comment before the story ran, Cohen repeatedly called Devin Wenig, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Markets Division and the No. 2 executive at Thomson Reuters, to complain about the story.

Wenig passed on the complaints to Reuters Editor in Chief David Schlesinger, who asked editors to look into them. Reuters editors debated the story for three days before finally killing it.

A Reuters spokeswoman, when contacted by Talking Biz News, commented, “We make decisions on whether or not to run stories purely on journalistic grounds.”

The decision has hit morale at the news agency, where reporters had been encouraged by the formation of an enterprise team in recent months, the hiring of a former New York Times Sunday business editor Jim Impoco to head that effort, and Goldstein moving over from a columnist position to investigative reporting.

The enterprise team also was allowing Reuters reporters to write longer analytical pieces which had been anathema at the news agency for years. In its first few months, the team had coordinated several hard-hitting pieces including one questioning the investment decisions of giant California pension fund Calpers, and a piece about China that caught the eye of the White House and led to an interview with President Obama.

“If Reuters wants to have credibility in enterprise reporting, its editors need to stand by reporters and resist pressure from people like Cohen,” said one Reuters insider.

http://weblogs.jomc.unc.edu/talkingbiznews/?p=12478#

 

Today's media is in the "advertising and public relations" business, not the journalism business.

 

Reuters also has a number of products that it softdollar "sells" to hedge funds, etc.

 

You can always write to Reuters and ask them why they cowered to Cohen.

David.Schlesinger@thomsonReuters.com
Devin.Wenig@ThomsonReuters.com

If you do, don't forget to ask each how many other stories they pulled when they would have come out negative against some of the powerful elite of Wall Street. This has captured media written all over it.

i wonder how much stock manipulation reporting Thomson Reuters has engaged in at the request of Stevie Cohen.

 

SAC has some serious influential power to manipulate the media with a phone call to the top of Reuters.......wonder how many topics/stories went SAC`s way,as in being positioned ahead of time?...as stated above.

 

A more restrained interpretation :

http://dealbreaker.com/2009/12/further-musings-on-the-ex-mrs.php

Apparently Patricia Cohen had been saying she was going to bring this case against Stevie for over a year now. It was clear that several reporters had been briefed on the situation, and told at various intervals “it’s coming next week” ad nauseum. There was a huge question mark as to whether or not the suit would actually ever be filed. For that reason there was some well-founded, widespread skittishness about printing a report claiming that the ex-Mrs SAC, who’d been divorced from the big guy for roughly two decades, was going to file a case...

 

You are not reading the article properly.

"Reuters editors last week killed a story by investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein about hedge fund trader Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to top Thomson Reuters executives that he was being persecuted by the news agency’s reporting, sources at Reuters said."

I guess I am not sure how that relates to news that Cohen's ex was talking up a lawsuit 2 years ago. It looks to me like Cohen made the calls only after he was under a firestorm and was aware more was coming.

 

With Money you can even committ murder in this country and get away scott free, much less a negative news story

 

statute of limitations anyone??

 

Stupid!

madoff & many others sshowss this is clearly wrong