Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect” politics program is coming to an end, and its ambitious “Bloomberg Politics” team will be rejiggered and woven back into the company’s overall Washington coverage, a source confirmed to POLITICO on Thursday.
“In the coming weeks, as Washington transitions from the Obama administration to the incoming Trump administration, our Bloomberg Politics team will transition as well—shifting our focus to the impact of politics and policy on the business and financial world. This is an area where we have unparalleled strength,” Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait and Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith wrote in a memo to staff. “In consultation with John [Heilemann] and Mark [Halperin], we have come to the mutual decision that WADR will reach its natural conclusion with the inauguration of President-Elect Trump. From now until December 2, the show will continue its daily broadcast; after that, the WADR team will concentrate its efforts on producing four special hour-long features previewing the Trump presidency to be broadcast in the week leading up to the inauguration, and then will provide coverage of the event itself.”
The Huffington Post first reported on the memo.
“With All Due Respect” will cease on Dec. 2. The show is also broadcast on MSNBC in the 6 p.m. hour. An MSNBC spokesperson declined to comment on what will replace the program on its lineup.
In their memo on Thursday, Micklethwait and Smith said "WADR" hosts Halperin and Heilemann are in talks to continue playing a role at Bloomberg as contributors and columnists.
The cuts come as part of a larger shakeup within the company that also included the departures of Bloomberg Businessweek’s top editor, Ellen Pollock, and Businessweek deputy editor Brian Wieners, and the naming of Washington bureau chief Megan Murphy as editor of Bloomberg Businessweek.
Bloomberg Politics launched in 2014 as a totally separate entity from its Washington coverage. It, along with “With All Due Respect,” the daily show hosted by Bloomberg Politics managing editors Halperin and Heilemann, was seen as the edgier and punchier version of Bloomberg’s otherwise staid coverage.
The politics vertical, which was mostly based out of New York, had reportedly ruffled the feathers of members of Bloomberg’s Washington bureau, some of whom felt that their coverage was being marginalized. The launch of the New York-based “With All Due Respect,” which followed the cancellation of a D.C.-based public affairs show, “Political Capital,” left some Washington staffers “feeling spurned” over the changing power center, POLITICO reported at the time.
Going forward, Bloomberg's political coverage will be more global in nature, with an emphasis on business coverage.
After rumors swirled last year that Michael Bloomberg wasn’t pleased with the political coverage and wouldn’t renew the contracts for Halperin and Heilemann following the election, Bloomberg asserted that he was a “devotee” of the vertical.
“It’s an important part of our TV line-up and our strategy, giving our customers the news and people they need going into election season,” he told POLITICO’s Joe Pompeo in October 2015. “I fully support it.”
A Bloomberg source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that “the idea that politics should be run from New York was sort of crazed from the outset.”
The full memo is below.
To everybody at Bloomberg Politics from John Micklethwait and Justin Smith
Since its launch in October 2014, Bloomberg Politics has been one of our most successful consumer media franchises, providing a constant stream of original and influential web, TV, and digital video content. Bloomberg Politics has put Bloomberg at the heart of this historic presidential campaign. That has required extraordinary effort, energy, and creativity by all of you.
With John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, we created the daily political show With All Due Respect (WADR). Its sophisticated, substantive, non-partisan reporting and analysis have made it one of the most talked-about programs of this campaign season. We creatively distributed the show for daily rebroadcast on MSNBC, where it has routinely been one the network’s highest rated shows in the hours before prime time. We made WADR available to viewers in many other ways: from Apple TV, Roku, and Twitter (where the show is now live streamed) to custom in-flight episodes for Delta Airlines. Twitter also chose Bloomberg Politics as its content partner to provide its first-ever live stream of the presidential and vice presidential debates—along with special pre- and post-game shows—reaching several million viewers per debate. In addition, the WADR team produced a slew of digital videos that became viral sensations on social media. And the team worked closely with Showtime on the network’s popular and widely acclaimed weekly documentary series, The Circus, starring Mark and John.
On the website and across all of our platforms, Bloomberg Politics has provided hour-by-hour election coverage, from breaking news to deep-dive features and data analytics, scrutinizing and explaining every twist and turn of the campaign. On the web, we introduced the innovative "Campaign Tracker" feature with its rolling news updates, and we continually delivered scoops and agenda-setting insight during the most volatile and unpredictable of presidential cycles. As a team, you all have a great deal to be proud of.
We would like to thank everybody for the enormous amount of work you have put in, and pay special tribute to Mark and John, who have crisscrossed America reporting for the show and site, building the brand and turning Bloomberg Politics into a preeminent player on the political media landscape.
But now the campaign is over. In the coming weeks, as Washington transitions from the Obama administration to the incoming Trump administration, our Bloomberg Politics team will transition as well—shifting our focus to the impact of politics and policy on the business and financial world. This is an area where we have unparalleled strength.
In consultation with John and Mark, we have come to the mutual decision that WADR will reach its natural conclusion with the inauguration of President-Elect Trump. From now until December 2, the show will continue its daily broadcast; after that, the WADR team will concentrate its efforts on producing four special hour-long features previewing the Trump presidency to be broadcast in the week leading up to the inauguration, and then will provide coverage of the event itself.
In February, we hope to launch a new television show focused on global politics and the impact of the new administration’s policies on business and finance worldwide, drawing on our unique international journalistic resources. Al Mayers will start this process and we look forward to hearing all of the ideas you will undoubtedly have for that. We are talking to John and Mark about them continuing to play a role at Bloomberg as contributors and columnists.
Similarly, on the Web, we will broaden out Bloomberg Politics from its domestic focus to a more global outlook, adding more reporting and analysis from Europe and Asia. Under the leadership of Marty Schenker, Wes Kosova, Craig Gordon, John Fraher, Jed Sandberg and Scott Havens, our teams will start designing a new more globally oriented website, allocating our journalistic resources accordingly.
We hope you will understand the need to adjust our course after the election and the changes entailed in that adjustment. But many things will stay the same. Politics will remain a key part of what Bloomberg does across all of our platforms. From the fallout from Brexit to the composition of the new House Ways and Means Committee to the new Trump administration’s agenda, we plan to provide robust coverage of policy and politics going forward; this content is highly and enduringly valuable to our audience and partners. We look forward to discussing these changes with you in person later this morning.
John and Justin