Tsunami: "Why do we care?"
Bloomberg's editorial supremo, Matt Winkler, is a lightning rod for disgruntled reporters at the wire service. But a website set up by the Newspaper Guild of New York, for the effort to unionize at Bloomberg, identifies other newsroom monsters at the secretive private company. On the Guild's online complaint forum, now defunct, an overseas employee noted another executive's less than sympathetic reaction to the disastrous tsunami that hit Thailand and Sri Lanka in December 2004.
From a Bloomberg News employee overseas on January 9, 2005: We are told that, on Dec. 27, John McCorry, who was chairing one of the news conference calls, interrupted various proposals on covering the tsunami to ask: "Why do we care?" This latest example of his finesse was greeted by silence. We knew McCorry was crass, but isn't this going a little far even for him? He's adding bad taste, maybe worse, to an already incompetent and unprofessional track record. It's truly astonishing that a company with employees of different creeds and origins living and working all over the world can keep such trash in positions of responsibility.