We’ve now confirmed that Bear Stearns has blocked employees from reading DealBreaker. After several phone calls to Bear Stearns, we’ve been unable to learn who made this decision and why it was made.
We began with the assumption that the blocking was an oversight. It seemed unbelievable that Bear would want to cut its employees off from the information DealBreaker provides each day. We realize that a lot of our readers drop by for some of our racier and more pure entertainment content. But a good amount of our readers also come for some more serious content—news about the latest development on the super SIV fund we call The Entity, analysis of backdating and shareholder access proposals, legal developments affecting Wall Street, layoffs and bonuses. Just last week we were the first to print the now widespread impression that the surprising stock market movements appeared to be caused to a major hedge fund liquidating certain positions.
Could it be something more? Could Bear think its employees, investors and clients are better off with less knowledge about this stuff than more? That didn’t make sense. We figured it was some monkey in the IT department or perhaps even some third-party blocker software that didn’t like all our references to some of the racier elements of life on Wall Street. (Which is kind of unfair. Sure we write about smoking dope—but Bear Stearns Jimmy Cayne is widely believed to actually smoke dope. Is writing about it worse than doing it?)
But Bear’s refusal to provide a plausible explanation—indeed, even to respond to our requests for information—raises a darker possibility: Bear Stearns might be retaliating against DealBreaker for reporting on fixed-income losses and executive high-jinx. If that’s so, it would be highly ironic since most of our work in this field has been emphasis and aggregation—pointing toward buried ledes in the Wall Street Journal or aggregating diverse resources to draw a fuller picture of the company. Surely if DealBreaker gets banned for writing about Cayne’s golf and smoking, the Wall Street Journal should be banned too. But they’d never get away with that. Banning DealBreaker is easier.
It’s still possible we’ve been banned by accident and not out of fear. But we’re tired of wondering, tired of being ignored by Bear's PR department and, frankly, we miss our loyal readers at Bear Stearns. So we’re giving Bear a chance to explain itself publicly here. Who banned DealBreaker and why? Send us an email (tips@dealbreaker.com) or call us at 212-334-1871.
Posted by , Nov 13, 2007 3:30PM
And proxy access, don't forget proxy access.
"It seemed unbelievable that Bear would want to cut its employees off from the information DealBreaker provides each day. " i would say i hope this is tongue in cheek but, obviously not!