Bloomberg Law tried to suppress its erroneous Labor Dept. story

[mahatmakanejeeves]

So it looks like @blaw is just going to full-on Alabama Sharpie their Leif Olson blunder.

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SweetDoomedAlabamaHat Retweeted

—@ErikWemple got his hands on that email instructing Bloomberg Law staffers to "not tweet out" story about Leif Olson being reinstated by Labor Department: "And really, please do not tweet even generally about Leif Olson coming back to the department..." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/06/bloomberg-law-tried-suppress-its-erroneous-labor-dept-story/ …

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In an internal email, a Bloomberg Law editor asked staffers not to tweet a story about Leif Olson:

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Opinions
Bloomberg Law tried to suppress its erroneous Labor Dept. story

By Erik Wemple, Media critic
September 6 at 2:40 PM

News organizations commonly request that their staffers promote their stories on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. And why not — the idea, after all, is to secure a large audience for the scoops and analysis in which the outlet takes such pride.

Now look at how an editor at Bloomberg Law instructed staffers to handle an upcoming story on a Labor Department appointee:

You may have heard that Leif Olson, the subject of our story yesterday, will rejoin the Labor Department. The agency announced it this morning, and we are about the post a story on it.

Please do not tweet out the story or about the story (or use any other social media to post anything). And really, please do not tweet even generally about Leif Olson coming back to the department, or engage with anyone on social media about it. That is only likely to invite more twitter-rage.

That directive went out on Wednesday night to labor staffers at Bloomberg Law. Why all the fuss to suppress a story about Olson? Bloomberg Law has some incentives on that front. On Tuesday, it published what reporter Ben Penn advertised as a “scoop”: Namely, that the Labor Department had accepted the resignation of Olson, a senior policy adviser in the department’s wage and hour division. That announcement came after Penn had alerted the Labor Department to allegedly anti-Semitic messages that Olson had posted to Facebook back in August 2016.

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Erik Wemple, The Washington Post's media critic, focuses on the cable-news industry. Before joining The Post, he ran a short-lived and much publicized local online news operation, and for eight years served as editor of Washington City Paper. Follow https://twitter.com/ErikWemple