LEAKER: Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media a CIA trap for advocacy journalists

INTERENET — Pierre Omidyar, eBay billionaire, spent 50 million dollars to launch First Look Media with the promise of popularizing Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill’s popular brand of American advocacy journalism.

Strange stories from disgruntled employees are circulating, describing a bewildering and mysterious boondoggle behind the scenes at First Look, but thankfully a confirmed and trustworthy anonymous leaker close to Omidyar has come forward with startling evidence explaining that the CIA granted Omidyar lucrative overseas business privileges in return for temporarily tying up hundreds of the best and brightest advocacy journalists.

According to the leaker, Anchors Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill acted as de facto editors, barking down nearly every story that made it to their desks. Their egos were set against one another and inflated with tremendous paychecks, bizarre massage-desks, and holographic monitors. Every trick in the CIA playbook was brought to bear on First Look’s boardroom. Subtle annoyance tactics were employed by CIA moles who succesfully instigated daily shouting matches and ruined any chance of publishing stories.

The leaker suggests that Glenn Greenwald, after promising to publish a list of names of citizens under illegal NSA surveillance, was shouted down by the whole office after Omidyar spread rumors that Greenwald found Edward Snowden “a repugnant traitor.”

The anonymous leaker wrote,

The CIA drew up First Look under code name Operation Snowjam, engineering it from top to bottom for optimum dysfunction. They had already worked with Omidyar extensively, as eBay features hugely in the CIA’s meddling in foreign markets, so he was quite willing to cooperate. The ‘best and brightest’ — that’s the CIA, not me — in advocacy journalism were brought in at dream-job pay, and they were lucky to publish anything at all!

It should be obvious to anyone with a skeptical mind that things are not as they seem. Just look at those with access to Snowden documents, that should tell you what you need to know. They never complain because they have been treated like royalty, handled so gently that they will never suspect a thing or give credence to the complaints of other journalists at First Look.

This is a crucial moment, and the image of the US is at its lowest point perhaps in all of history. Operation Snowjam is, for the CIA, small potatoes. But right now, every little bit counts.