Bloomberg News has reportedly fired a prominent White House reporter for breaking a reporting embargo on the prisoner swap that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich from a Russian prison.
Jennifer Jacobs, the Bloomberg news agency’s senior White House correspondent, was fired on Monday after Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait vowed to discipline staff for rushing the dramatic deal. According to Charlotte Klein of New York magazine:
“Jennifer Jacobs, one of two Bloomberg reporters who signed the article that broke Gershkovich’s embargo, has been fired, according to a source familiar with the matter.” Posted by Klein Going to X on Monday.
Mr. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent jailed in Russia on espionage charges, and fellow American Paul Whelan were among 20 people freed Thursday in the largest prisoner swap between Washington and Moscow since the Cold War.
Publication of the story was banned until it was determined that Gershkovich and his companions were safe from Russian clutches.
But Bloomberg published the story at 7:41 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday. Minutes later, one of the company’s editors posted to X, “Helping break this story has been one of the greatest honors of my career. I love my job and my colleagues.”
About an hour later, the Bloomberg article was updated with the comment, “An earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect that the Americans have not yet been released.”
The Journal, owned by the paper’s parent company News Corp, published the story just after 11 a.m. Eastern time after it was confirmed that Gershkovich and the other Americans had been released from Russian custody.
Micklethwait acknowledged that the Bloomberg article “may have jeopardized the negotiated exchange that freed them.”
“Even if our story fortunately did not result in any change, it was a blatant violation of the editorial standards that have made this newsroom trusted around the world,” he wrote.
Journal staff and other news organizations were infuriated that Bloomberg had broken the embargo.
“We literally [Journal chief foreign affairs correspondent] Yaroslav Trofimov on Earth [in Turkey] “We were waiting with binoculars for Evan to come off the plane, and as soon as we saw him we headed out to the pub,” a Journal source told New York Magazine.
A Bloomberg spokesman declined to comment when contacted by The Washington Post.
Micklethwait told staff that Bloomberg’s standards editors had conducted a “thorough investigation” and taken “disciplinary action against several individuals involved.”
Bloomberg News will review its processes “to ensure such a failure never happens again.”
Micklethwait wrote that he personally sent letters of apology to each of the Americans who were released.
He also said he “immediately” apologized to the Journal’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, on Thursday.
