President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign revoked press credentials from Bloomberg News reporters on Tuesday, accusing the news outlet of bias following the launch of Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale announced the move in response to Bloomberg News’ editor-in-chief John Micklethwait’s new editorial guidelines on covering the 2020 race, which mandate that the outlet will not investigate Bloomberg or any of the other Democratic primary candidates.
Parscale said the guidelines were “troubling and wrong.”
“Since they have declared their bias openly, the Trump campaign will no longer credential representatives of Bloomberg News for rallies or other campaign events,” he said.
Micklethwait slammed the campaign’s decision in an official statement.
“The accusation of bias couldn’t be further from the truth,” Micklethwait said. “We have covered Donald Trump fairly and in an unbiased way since he became a candidate in 2015 and will continue to do so despite the restrictions imposed by the Trump campaign.”
On November 24, the same day Bloomberg officially launched his campaign, Micklethwait sent out a memo to his editorial staff advising them that the outlet would “continue our tradition of not investigating Mike (and his family and foundation) and we will extend the same policy to his rivals in the Democratic primaries” because “we cannot treat Mike’s Democratic competitors differently from him.”
The editor-in-chief told the reporters that the outlet would continue to investigate Trump and his administration “as the government of the day.”
“If Mike is chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate (and Donald Trump emerges as the Republican one), we will reassess how we do that,” Micklethwait wrote.
