Another Close Look

Glenn Greenwald, at his personal blog, replies to an email from a reader re: his new Pierre Omidyar/First Look media venture and his NSA reporting.  Among his revelations/explanations:

--He has no ownership stake in First Look at all.  "My relationship to First Look is fundamentally unchanged from my relationship to Salon and the Guardian: I will write my blog and news articles which they publish. The only formal difference is that, because it's a start-up, we're building the whole thing from the ground up, and part of my work now, and in the future, will go beyond just the journalism I'm personally producing to help shape and construct what the new venture will be. That is a big part of what makes it so exciting for me."

--"The centrality of me and the NSA story to this new venture has been wildly overstated. Yes, my joining it is what caused there to be a lot of publicity in the first instance, but that's only because we were not ready to announce it when it leaked. This is going to be a general-interest media outlet with many dozens of journalists, editors and others with long and established histories of journalism, and obviously extends far beyond my work or the NSA story."

--They are not "holding back documents."

--Media have wrongly claimed that only he has the full Snowden docs, ignoring that Laura Poitras also has them.

--The theories that Omidyar created the new org to suppress Snowden docs that make him or eBay/PayPal look bad is "absurd...the very idea that this large group of people with a history of very independent journalism against the largest governmental and corporate entities is suddenly going to be told that they're "not allowed" to publish a big story because Pierre doesn't want it published, and we're all just going to passively and quietly obey, is truly laughable to me, but I concede that I can't disprove that to you."