We’re discovering more and more shocking things about the private life of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Shocking, but not surprising. The rich and powerful frequently come with stories hidden in the shadows that tell of salacious activities and rumors of impropriety. Maybe not so oddly enough, these stories about Gates were only in the shadows because our mainstream media knew about them but decided not to report on them.

According to the New York Post, Gates was something of a womanizer and was known for throwing pool parties where he’d invite strippers to swim naked for him and his friends, even after he met his future wife, Melinda. Despite this being a relatively open secret, the folks at The New York Times sat on this information but decided to never cover it:

The Microsoft co-founder’s wild lifestyle was well known among his inner circle — but newspapers like the New York Times hid the unflattering reports to continue getting “spoon-fed stories,” James Wallace wrote in the 1997 biography, “Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace.”

They “didn’t report on the wild bachelor parties that Microsoft’s boyish chairman would throw in his Seattle home, for which Gates would visit one of Seattle’s all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool,” Wallace wrote.

It was a continuation from his time at Harvard, where he “did like to frequent Boston’s notorious Combat Zone, with its porn shows, strip joints, and prostitutes,” Wallace wrote.

This lifestyle continued even after he began dating Melinda. According to Wallace, he’d do things that would get him in trouble in today’s age such as hit on female journalists who were tasked with covering Microsoft and the tech industry.

Cheating on Melinda was a common thing for Gates, apparently. According to former Microsoft exec Vern Raburn, finding Gates with someone else was usual in the early days.

“Being naked in a pool is no big deal,” Raburn told the outlet. But “there’s a difference between being naked in a pool with a whole bunch of other people, and being naked in a pool with somebody else, or in a bed with somebody else,” he said of Gates not being faithful to Melinda at first.

Wallace noted that Gates’s womanizing “was well known, although not well reported.”

Why wasn’t it well reported?

It was obvious even then that Gates was a tech powerhouse and that he was changing the world as we knew it. The last thing any news organization would want to do is get into his bad graces, and as a result, they would do anything to stay within them, including not reporting on things that might make him look bad to the general public. Especially in the 1980s, this lifestyle would have been shocking to a good deal of America.

So the Times not only sat on it in silence, but they would send female journalists to the womanizing Gates knowing full-well how he would treat them.

Media outlets not covering the full story on Gates should surprise you as much as learning a billionaire has dark carnal habits. A media outlet with powerful friends is powerful as well, and the more power the better.

Remember that the media is not a public service, it’s a business with an agenda. If it means withholding or misreporting in order to get ahead, it will do it. Journalistic integrity will often take a back seat to open doors and a bigger paycheck, and you’ll notice the nobility of needing to tell the whole story only arise when the agenda calls for it.

It’s likely that the rich and powerful have a lot more skeletons in their closets, and it’s proven that many members of the media know all about them, but say nothing. It’s also very likely that there are skeletons in their closets as well.