Does his financial support for Ukrainian political groups pose problems for his budding media empire?
Website PandoDaily published a story Friday reporting that Omidyar, along with the U.S. government, had bankrolled groups active in opposing the recently toppled government of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
Omidyar is also funding First Look Media, a budding media colossus, to the tune of $250 million. His marquee hire is Glenn Greenwald, a crusading left-of-center journalist who has been the leader in coverage of the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In a breathless article written as if it were unearthing major skullduggery, PandoDaily's Mark Ames wrote: "What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with U.S. 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 so-disant 'independent journalists' which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and overseas, and boasts of its uniquely 'adversarial' relationship toward these government institutions."
Ames also claimed that Omidyar had purchased the silence of the "dream team" of writers he has hired and the rest of the fawning press, who were not weighing in on his questionable deeds.
Greenwald promptly ended that silence Sunday with a post that quickly took the air out of the "this just in" scoop when he pointed out Omidyar's aid had been disclosed in a press release on the Omidyar Network website when he made pro-democracy grants to the Ukrainian group and five others in 2011.
The famously independent Greenwald conceded that he hadn't known that before, just as he didn't know much about the funding sources of previous employers Salon and the Guardian, where he had broken so many stories about NSA surveillance. He said it didn't matter, because none of that would have affected his reporting. Just as the Omidyar "revelations" won't.
While there may be more to the story, at this juncture I hardly see a major media scandal here. But it does underscore that we are in very different waters.
For years, potential or actual conflicts of interest were off-limits in American journalism. Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. went to the extreme of refusing to vote, on the grounds that that very act might compromise his independence.
Two things have made a dent in the traditional approach: the rise of the freewheeling Internet, and the huge financial challenge facing traditional news outlets in the digital age. The latter has brought nonprofit journalism to the fore, and with it funders with social agendas.
So a new approach is achieving grudging acceptance: It's OK if funders, news outlets and journalists have a point of view, as long as it is fully disclosed, and as long as their factual reporting sticks to the truth.
For example: ProPublica has been heavily underwritten by a foundation with a liberal bent. But its investigative reporting has been widely praised as fact-based, on-target and not swayed by ideology.
Or take the NSA surveillance saga. Yes, Glenn Greenwald is an unabashed liberal. But his reporting has been totally solid. And the revelations in the Snowden documents he and Bart Gellman of The Washington Post and others have brought to light provided vital information to the American people and started a sorely-needed debate about privacy in the U.S.
So as the Omidyar venture, which has launched its first digital magazine, The Intercept, takes shape, it will be watched closely. But I continue to see it as source of hope, not alarm
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