npr | Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth
of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the
Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.
"They
assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife,"
the author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher tells NPR. "I was just an
appendage of their employee. I was not a human being."
Fincher is married to the journalist Mike Forsythe, a former Beijing correspondent for Bloomberg News who now works at The New York Times. In 2012, Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China's ruling classes.
The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against
publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story
anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer.
Even
so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese
leaders' ties to the country's richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in
the reporters' sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The story gained steam throughout 2013.
In emails sent back to
Bloomberg's journalists in China seen by Fincher, senior news editors in
New York City expressed excitement.
And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran.
"Mike
and some of the other reporters and editors who had been working on
this story just were asking for answers about ... why was this story
killed?" Fincher says.
