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Ken Silverstein Explains Why He Left First Look

Submitted by Guest on Mon, 03/02/2015 - 20:32

Hawaii Political Info introduction: Multi-billionaire Honolulu resident Pierre Omidyar founded Honolulu Civil Beat a few years ago. He later launched a separate, ambitious, more widely encompassing news project that landed some of the best-known and most able investigative journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Matt Taibbi.

Ken Silverstein joined Omidyar's news organization, but has since left. Here he gives his view on why.

The Huffington Post

By Catherine Taibi

March 2, 2014

Ken Silverstein joined First Look Media because it promised the freedom to pursue "fearless journalism." But after a mere 14 months at eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s upstart outlet, Silverstein quit his post dramatically last week, saying he was hired “under false pretenses.”

"At First Look, we were never able to be fearless," writes Silverstein, a former senior investigative reporter at First Look, in a new piece for Politico Magazine. "We couldn’t do anything, because we spent so much time in pointless meetings and being slowed down, when we wrote anything, by a lack of support from management and the dire shortage of editors to actually oversee and work with the writers."

At its outset, the media company outlined plans to introduce multiple digital publications run by some of the biggest names in the industry. In February 2014, the organization launched its first online magazine, The Intercept, co-founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. The Intercept billed itself as a source of “aggressive and independent adversarial journalism" on issues of national security, government spying and political corruption." First Look also hired Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi in early 2014 to run Racket, a satirical digital magazine.

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