Kathy Kiely, the Washington news director for Bloomberg Politics, resigned Wednesday over concerns the company could not adequately cover owner Michael Bloomberg's considerations about whether to run for president as an independent candidate.
"I did not feel we could cover the Bloomberg trial balloon in the aggressive way I thought it deserved," Kiely told HuffPost.
"I think there are a lot of good people at Bloomberg making an honest effort to work this out," she said. "I just feel very strongly that the rules of the game should be the same for everybody."
Bloomberg News has long placed restrictions on its coverage of its owner, a former mayor of New York City, barring reporters from writing about his personal life and wealth. The news organization's coverage of Bloomberg was scant this past weekend following a report in The New York Times that he was weighing a run.
Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin discussed Bloomberg’s possible run Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and later that day on Bloomberg TV’s “With All Due Respect,” which he hosts with journalist John Heilemann. On Tuesday, Bloomberg Politics aggregated a Washington Post story about the possibility of Bloomberg running at a time when 42 percent of Americans identify as independent.
"We've covered the speculation every day since the Times story was published," said a Bloomberg News spokesman. "Our Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait is in charge of decisions about coverage."
Kiely, a veteran of National Journal, USA Today and several regional newspapers, joined Bloomberg Politics last year to act as a liaison between the Washington and New York offices following tensions over control of political coverage.
"The bottom line is, you can’t cover the circus unless you can write about one of the biggest elephants in the room," Kiely said.