As long time readers of DealBreaker know, our site is blocked by Bear Stearns. Alone among Wall Street firms, Bear Stearns refuses to let its employees—at least those in the New York offices—read DealBreaker. It seems strange that any financial firm would want to cut its employees off from commentary and information—however irreverent and occasionally smutty—available to its competitors. But that’s what Bear Stearns has done.

We never got a satisfactory answer from Bear Stearns about why they had decided to jam the signal from DealBreaker’s bunker. Was it in retaliation for something we had written about the firm? Did we pay too much attention to the collapse of those hedge funds? Or was it the golfing and the dope smoking? Maybe Bess Levin was just too edgy for the famously delicate sensibilities of Bear’s bond traders.

We were told, at some point, that Bear had blocked us because our comments section was a breach of their internal confidentiality controls. They block every site that allows comments, Bear claimed. But this just isn’t true. You can comment on the Wall Street Journal’s DealJournal and on the New York Times’ DealBook. Neither the Times nor the Journal are blocked. So there must be something special about DealBreaker.

Whatever it is, Bear wasn’t willing to share. We tried raising this scandal to higher-ups at Bear but the management was, it seems, too “hands off” to get involved with what everyone kept telling us was an IT issue. So, with a new CEO taking office, we’re asking: Will Bear Stearns unblock DealBreaker? Or will they at least provide a credible answer about why they block us?

We won’t go through the litany of stories we’ve broken on this site or the market moving rumors we’ve been the first to make public. But we will say that we’re not exactly inspired by the competence of a firm that thinks it’s a good idea to make employees wait to hear the word on the street from someone who picks it up from DealBreaker a day or two later. Also, it hurts our feelings. We're here, risking our lives each and every day, for our readers. Blocking the site just seems rude. If the new CEO wants to make a splash, he might start by removing this weird dam in flow of information to Bear Stearns.

Come on, Alan. What are you afraid of?