Where Journalism Goes to Die
Glenn Greenwald, Pierre Omidyar, Adnan Syed and my battles with First Look Media.
By KEN SILVERSTEIN February 27, 2015
The delays were caused in part by management’s execution of Racket, which left me with a bunch of stories and no place to post them. But even after I moved over to The Intercept, I struggled to get any work published because of the shortage of editors and general organizational chaos.
All I ask in journalism is that I have the freedom to publish the best, most true pieces that I can. I think that as journalists we should be skeptical of everyone—corporations, governments, non-profits and media. I think you need to be especially critical of your own point of view and of people you admire and be willing to write negatively about them with as much enthusiasm as you do about your “enemies” (of which I very obviously have none). All I ask is that I have the freedom to pursue my reporting as I see fit—and it’s served me well at Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications over my long career.
But at First Look, we were never able to be fearless. 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. We were just lost.
The culture at First Look was just too strange. And fearless wasn’t a word that would factor into our corporate life. At last year’s holiday party, two of our fiercely “independent” staffers “interviewed” Pierre Omidyar and asked him what he did in the morning. Since you are all hanging on the edge of your seats, he drinks tea and reads stuff, the New York Times and other things and then The Intercept was about No. 5 (he claims). The whole thing was sad.
The beginning of the end for me, though, came as The Intercept launched into what would turn out to be basically the biggest story of its short existence: The Serial chronicles.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/ken-silverstein-the-intercept-115586_Page3.html#ixzz3Sy0lrTb3
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