Money matters.
It's fair to examine and question the sources of journalists' paychecks, whether they cover science, politics, or Edward Snowden. But it's not fair to build something up as an exclusive when the news has already been released elsewhere.
By these precepts, a recent article in PandoDaily raising questions about the Ukranian connections of Glenn Greenwald's publisher, the billionaire Pierre Omidyar, is both fair and unfair.
On Feb. 28, PandoDaily ran a story under the headline, "Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show."
The article began with a description of a reporter at one of Omidyar's blogs, The Intercept, digging into the developing story in Ukraine and suggesting that the United States provided funding to the opposition groups that toppled the government. But that wasn't what the article's author, Mark Ames found shocking. "What’s shocking is the name of the billionaire who co-invested with the US government," he wrote: Pierre Omidyar.
Ames proceeds with a series of quotes from "documents" and "financial records" to make the case. He then writes:
What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with US foreign policy agencies to interfere in foreign governments, co-financing regime change with well-known arms of the American empire — while at the same time hiring a growing team of soi-disant ”independent journalists” which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and overseas, and boasts of its uniquely “adversarial” relationship towards these government institutions.
Two things:
1. Ames does not make the case that Omidyar is working "hand-in-glove" with U.S. foreign policy agencies.
2. This is a legitimate conflict of interest that ought to be brought into the sunlight.
Actually, three things:
3. This isn't the staggering disclosure Ames makes it out to be. Omidyar has made no secret of hit contributions to Ukraine; he disclosed the funding in a press release in 2011. This will not surprise Ames, who linked to this disclosure in his story.
A day after Ames's article appeared, Glenn Greenwald responded on The Intercept. "I think it's perfectly valid for journalists to investigate the financial dealings of corporations and billionaires who fund media outlets," he wrote. He also legitimately notes that many other news organizations are owned by people or companies whose political activities might be suspect.
Greenwald:
But for me, the issue is not – and for a long time has not been – the political views of those who fund journalism. Journalists should be judged by the journalism they produce, not by those who fund the outlets where they do it. The real issue is whether they demand and obtain editorial freedom. We have. But ultimately, the only thing that matters is the journalism we or any other media outlets produce.
I agree, with one reservation. Readers and outsiders have no way of being sure that the journalism they are reading is free from the influence of the owners. We can judge the journalism we see, but how can we judge the journalism we don't see? That is, how would we know if a news organization decided not to do a story because of intervention from the publisher, or–a more likely scenario–because of journalists' concerns that a story might provoke a confrontation with the publisher?
One safeguard we have is the proliferation of news sites on the web. Different publishers have different alliances and political views, and the more of them we have, the more likely it is that a wide variety of views will be available.
If we got all of our science news from one or two sources, we might worry about the influence of the publishers and whether those sources had a point of view that affected what they covered, and how they covered it. With the many sources of science news we can turn to now, we have a little less reason to worry.
-Paul Raeburn
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