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Glenn Greenwald lauds bravery of RT’s Abby Martin, then NY Times outs her as 9/11 Truther

By Tony Ortega
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
 
Abby Martin (Screenshot)
 

Let’s follow the bouncing ball on this one as it takes some unpredictable rebounds.

On Friday, PandoDaily’s Mark Ames revealed that Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire funding Glenn Greenwald’s new journalistic effort, First Look, had helped fund efforts to bolster the opposition groups in Ukraine responsible for ousting President Viktor Yanukovych. Ames wondered about Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras, two people with access to the full cache of Snowden documents, working for a billionaire who was using his money to affect global politics.

On Saturday, Greenwald fired back, ridiculing Ames for suggesting that Greenwald wouldn’t act completely independently as a journalist, regardless of who was writing his paychecks. In fact, he said, he didn’t even particularly care about Omidyar’s political activities: “Prior to creating The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, I did not research Omidyar’s political views or donations.”

On Monday, PandoDaily’s Paul Carr pointed out that in 2007, Greenwald had a very different attitude about the political ambitions of media owners when he lambasted The Politico because its president and CEO was a longtime Reaganite. Wrote Greenwald then: “There is nothing wrong per se with hard-core political operatives running a news organization. Long-time Republican strategist Roger Ailes oversees Fox News, of course. But it seems rather self-evident that a news organization run by someone with such clear-cut political biases ought to have a hard time holding itself out as some sort of politically unbiased source of news.” (Emphasis ours.)

Then, Tuesday morning, Greenwald seemed to be addressing this squabble when he celebrated RT anchor Abby Martin for her views on Putin’s invasion of Crimea.

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