from MintPress News
A select group of national news “stakeholders” gathered at an undisclosed location for what was described as a “semi-secret” workshop
somewhere in Canada on January 26. The meeting had been convened to
determine how and to whom a “news industry bailout” of $645 million in
Canadian government subsidies to private and supposedly independent
media outlets would be disbursed. It was a striking event that signaled
both the crisis of legitimacy faced by mainstream media and the
desperate measures that are being proposed to answer it.
Jesse Brown, a Canadian journalist
who participated in the meeting, complained that the first thing he
noticed about it “was that one major public ‘stakeholder’ wasn’t
represented: the public.” Inside what amounted to a smoke filled room
that was off limits to most Canadian citizens, Ben Scott — a former
Obama administration official who also served in Hillary Clinton’s State
Department — presided over the discussions. Today, as the director of
policy and advocacy for the Omidyar Network, Scott works for one of the
most quietly influential billionaires in helping to shape the media
landscape and define the craft of journalism itself.
His boss is Pierre Omidyar, the ebay founder best known for his sponsorship of The Intercept,
a flashy progressive publication that possesses the classified
documents exfiltrated by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Unlike rival
Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt,
Omidyar has mostly managed to keep his influential role in media below
the radar. And while he directs his fortune into many of the same
politically strategic NGOs and media outlets that George Soros does in
hotspots around the globe, he has never been subjected to the public
scrutiny and often ugly attacks that dog Soros. And yet Samantha Power,
the former U.S. ambassador to the UN and liberal interventionist guru,
has explicitly praised Omidyar as someone who is following in the footsteps of Soros.
The almost total absence of critical
coverage that Omidyar enjoys is partly the product of his aversion to
publicity. Unlike Soros, who seems to yearn for the media limelight,
Omidyar is an eccentric figure who owns a “safe house” in the wilds of
the American West; he interacts with business partners in
virtual-reality simulations he funds, and has been magnetized by New Age
gurus. But the free pass Omidyar has received from the media is also a
testament to how much money he has channeled into it – as well into the
organizations that ostensibly exist to keep it honest.
While backing media outlets around
the world that produce news and commentary, Omidyar supports a global
cartel of self-styled fact-checking groups that determine which outlets
are legitimate and which are “fake.” He has also thrown his money behind
murky initiatives like the non-profit backing New Knowledge, the data
firm that waged one of the most devious disinformation campaigns
in any recent American election campaign; and he is a key backer of the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), the outfit
that holds the Panama Papers and oversees the strategic dissemination
of that leaked trove of financial files to hand-picked journalists.
At the base of this vast media empire
is a nepotistic culture that has seen the beneficiaries of Omidyar’s
funding come in for gushing praise from the same fact-checking
organizations he supports, while the journalists nurtured by his
donations reap high-profile awards from the Omidyar-sponsored Committee
to Protect Journalists. Last November, Omidyar backed the release of a
documentary hyping up the journalists that helped expose the Panama
Papers, and he is also involved in a feature film starring Meryl Streep
about the leaked documents and the heroic reporters covering them. The
conflicts of interests created under the billionaire’s watch are many
but, as with his own political activities, they have been scrutinized by
only a handful of journalists.
Behind the image he has cultivated of
himself as a “progressive philanthropreneur,” Omidyar has wielded his
media empire to advance the Washington consensus in strategic hotspots
around the globe. His fortune helped found an outlet to propel a
destabilizing coup in Ukraine; he’s helped establish a network of
oppositional youth activists and bloggers in Zimbabwe; and in the
Philippines he has invested in an oppositional news site that is honing
corporate surveillance techniques like a “mood meter…to capture
non-rational reactions.” Meanwhile, he has partnered closely with the
leading arms of U.S. soft power, from the U.S. Agency for International
Aid and Development (USAID) to the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED) — acting as a conduit for information warfare-style projects in
countries around the world...
[read more here]
Interesting article - although most of these revelations were due to Mark Ames (in 2015), and later Yasha Levine. I remember you covering all this on your old blog, Scott. Omidyar has always been a neoliberal. His micro-finance projects in India, were a collosal disaster, ending in countless suicides of those who took the credits advanced. Well, at least this article gives credit (via links) to some of Ames's work. I have, over time, come to the conclusion that Snowden was a limited hangout, and that he is in fact still part of the Deep State. I have also come to question Laura Poitras, a very wealthy woman from the start, before she became famous as a result of the Snowden leaks. Her films before this were in no sense controversial, and it made no sense whatsoever for Snowden to contact her in the first place, unless she is part of the deception from the get go - and her personal involvement with Jacob Applebaum, a hipster narcissist if there ever was one, makes this even more darkly comical. Applebaum, before he got ousted by the hacker community for his sexual exploits, gave lectures in Arab States touting surveillance measures etc. A long list of shady characters...
ReplyDeleteGreetings, Ella