B’BERG SUCK-UP SNAFU?

WF ‘offender’ agita

A dustup at Bloomberg News has thrown its top editor into the spotlight, with insiders questioning whether he caved to pressure from one of the parent company’s biggest corporate clients.

Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait earlier this year reassigned a reporter who had been covering Wells Fargo after the bank’s chief executive, Tim Sloan, called to complain about the reporter, according to three sources close to the situation.

That was after Cheyenne Hopkins — a p.r. rep who used to be a reporter at Bloomberg — claimed in a memo to Wells Fargo executives that the Bloomberg reporter, Shahien Nasiripour, had threatened her during a heated phone call on March 7, according to the sources.

Big banks like Wells Fargo are key clients for parent Bloomberg LP’s $20,000-ayear terminal service, whose subscriptions have been flat to slightly up in recent years, relying on growth from Asia to offset weakness at home.

Hopkins, an executive at the p.r. firm Edelman, declined to comment on the situation when reached by The Post. Bloomberg, Wells Fargo and Nasiripour also declined to comment.

According to two people who overheard the feisty phone exchange, Nasiripour asked Hopkins to hand over an internal memo that the bank had earlier given to The Wall Street Journal. When Hopkins refused, Nasiripour shot back that he would call up other sources and Wells Fargo execs to get the memo without her help.

Although Nasiripour raised his voice, according to one source, he didn’t curse, and neither source saw the reporter’s behavior as threatening.

“It was intense, but it wasn’t eyebrow-raising,” one witness said.

After Sloan called to complain, Micklethwait summoned Nasiripour to meet and surprised him by telling him he was no longer covering the bank, reassigning him to instead cover the Trump Organization, according to CNN, which first reported on the incident on Monday.

A Bloomberg spokesman declined to comment on whether Sloan directly asked Micklethwait to remove Nasiripour. Two executives close to the editor said he reassigned Nasiripour in an attempt to avoid appearing biased.

Morale has tanked under Micklethwait, according to some insiders, who complain he’s rarely seen in the newsroom since Michael Bloomberg lured him from the Economist in 2015.

“He loves his dinners with banking people,” one insider sniffed.

To make matters worse, Nasiripour — who already had been pressured by his supervisor to apologize to Hopkins and two Wells Fargo reps — was then assigned to personally train his replacement, who a few months earlier had landed an entry-level reporting position after a stint as an intern, according to sources.