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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/30/14

The Inside Story of Matt Taibbi's Departure From First Look Media

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Reprinted from The Intercept

This article co-written by Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and John Cook

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Matt Taibbi, who joined First Look Media just seven months ago, left the company on Tuesday. His departure -- which he describes as a refusal to accept a work reassignment, and the company describes as a resignation -- was the culmination of months of contentious disputes with First Look founder Pierre Omidyar, chief operating officer Randy Ching, and president John Temple over the structure and management of Racket, the digital magazine Taibbi was hired to create. Those disputes were exacerbated by a recent complaint from a Racket employee about Taibbi's behavior as a manager.

The departure of the popular former Rolling Stone writer is a serious setback for First Look in its first year of operations. Last January, Omidyar announced with great fanfare that he would personally invest $250 million in the company to build "a general interest news site that will cover topics ranging from entertainment and sports to business and the economy" incorporating multiple "digital magazines" as well as a "flagship news site."

One year later, First Look still has only one such magazine, The Intercept.

Omidyar has publicly and privately pledged multiple times that First Look will never interfere with the stories produced by its journalists. He has adhered to that commitment with both The Intercept and Racket, and Taibbi has been clear that he was free to shape Racket's journalism fully in his image. His vision was a hard-hitting, satirical magazine in the style of the old Spy that would employ Taibbi's facility for merciless ridicule, humor, and parody to attack Wall Street and the corporate world. First Look was fully behind that vision.

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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
 

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