Bloomberg apologizes for premature story on prisoner swap and disciplines the journalists involved

Bloomberg News apologized and disciplined employees on Monday for prematurely publishing a story last week that revealed a prisoner exchange involving the United States and Russia that led to the release of detained American journalist Evan Gershkovich.

Bloomberg’s story, released before the prisoners had actually been freed, violated the company’s ethical standards, John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, said in a memo to his staff.

The company would not say how many employees were disciplined and would not identify them. The story carried the bylines of Jennifer Jacobs, senior White House reporter for Bloomberg News, and Cagan Koc, Amsterdam bureau chief.

“We take accuracy very seriously,” Micklethwait said in the memo. “But we also have a responsibility to do the right thing. In this case we didn’t.”

Besides Wall Street Journal reporter Gershkovich, the exchange freed Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive jailed since 2018, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with dual U.S.-Russia citizenship. In return, the U.S. and other countries gave up Russians who had been charged or convicted of serious crimes.

Gershkovich’s imprisonment on espionage charges that his family and newspaper denied attracted particular attention in the journalism community, and the Journal campaigned vigorously for his release. Word of the deal had begun to spread among people familiar with the cases and the White House briefed reporters about it on an embargo basis — meaning the journalists agreed not to release the information until given an official go-ahead.

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