How Bloomberg Broke The Washington Post's Rick Santorum Scoop

How Bloomberg Broke The Washington Post's Santorum Scoop

NEW YORK -- The political news cycle kicked into overdrive Tuesday afternoon when Bloomberg News staffers began tweeting that Rick Santorum was leaving the Republican race.

Bloomberg TV host Emily Chang tweeted the following: "Report: Santorum dropping out." Soon Chang elaborated, adding in a second tweet that Santorum "will announce today that he is suspending his presidential campaign" and cited the Washington Post as her source. And Bloomberg news editor Sarah Rabil tweeted, "Breaking: Washington Post says Rick Santorum will suspend presidential campaign."

The only problem was that there was neither a Post report available online nor a reporter from the Post breaking the news on Twitter.

On the contrary, Post political reporter Aaron Blake shot down the Bloomberg tweets. "Washington Post is NOT reporting that Santorum is dropping out," Blake tweeted. "We have NOT reported this, despite tweets to the contrary."

And yet the Twitterverse had already erupted, with political reporters frantically calling sources in hopes of confirming the report. But it wasn't for another 20 minutes that the Post -- now joined by several major news outlets -- reported that Santorum would soon be suspending his campaign.

So what happened?

A Bloomberg spokesperson explained that the Washington Post story went out on the Post's syndication wire at 1:42 p.m. That service is available to Bloomberg terminal subscribers worldwide. The Bloomberg team that monitors top stories then highlighted it for subscribers and cited the Post as the source. Bloomberg staffers, seeing the big political news, tweeted it out.

While that explains how Bloomberg got a hold of the scoop, it still isn't clear why the Post story ran on the syndication service but not online. Nor is it clear why Blake and other Post staffers denied the report. A Post spokesperson has not yet responded to The Huffington Post's request for comment.

UPDATE: 5:25 p.m. -- A Post spokesperson responds: "The draft story was not intended to be published until we confirmed that Santorum was suspending his campaign. The draft was inadvertently sent to Bloomberg, with whom The Post has a partnership, through an automated feed. It was not published on our Web site until the news had been confirmed."

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