What if newspaper journalists used their paper's advertising department to get more information about sources? That's essentially what reporters from Bloomberg News are accused of doing.
Bloomberg's editorial department has been caught spying on sources using terminal data from the company's financial services arm.
A former Bloomberg News employee told CNBC on Saturday that despite working in the editorial section, he was able to access supposedly confidential terminal information about Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
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The reporter would access the data "just for fun" and "to show how powerful" the Bloomberg terminals were.
The CNBC report comes after the New York Post broke the news last week that Bloomberg reporters had also been using the terminal data to spy on employees of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.
After the scandal was first reported, Dan Doctoroff, the Bloomberg chief executive, admitted on Friday that Bloomberg customer data has long been available to Bloomberg journalists. “We realize this was a mistake," Doctoroff told the Financial Times.
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