Early last week, Ken Silverstein — former Harpers editor and founder of Counterpunch — quit Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, citing management incompetence. [UPDATE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Silverstein as co-founder of Counterpunch with Alexander Cockburn; Silverstein sent me an email correctly noting that he founded Counterpunch four months before Cockburn joined, one of those small but not insignificant errors I know all too well as the sole founding editor of The eXile—M.A.] By the end of the week, he went a step further, publishing a searing takedown of First Look on Politico.

[A]t 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.

But, Silverstein assures us, it wasn't his fault he was taken in by Omidyar. After all, despite earning the reputation as one of American's foremost investigative journalists, Silverstein never quite got around to investigating his new boss before taking the First Look Media gig:

I knew at the time little about Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire who founded and funded First Look, but he wasn’t a big part of my decision-making. I assumed Omidyar must be a decent guy if he was going to pour $250 million into a new journalism venture, as he promised.

Silverstein's claims might seem laughable were he the only Omidyar hire to protest his ignorance at the eBay founder's background. In fact, it turns out that almost everyone involved in First Look -- particularly those who have since resigned -- entered into Omidyar's employment without bothering to do any background reading.

Take Glenn Greenwald — fiercely independent, lawyer by training, famous for the lightening speed with which he has been able to dig up piles of incriminating research material on his adversaries and turn it around into published material. Even this maestro of muckraking claimed to have been blindsided last year when Pando reported on the role Omidyar played co-financing the groups and figures that organized Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. Greenwald's response:

I was not previously aware that the Omidyar Network donated to this Ukrainian group [that helped organize the February 2014 Ukraine revolution]. That’s because, prior to creating The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, I did not research Omidyar’s political views or donations. That’s because his political views and donations are of no special interest to me...

Or consider Matt Taibbi, muckraker extraordinairre with nearly two decades of adversarial journalism experience exposing billionaire oligarchs and their power over politics and media. A year ago, Taibbi personally vouched for First Look Media’s uniqueness among billionaire-backed media projects:

“This is clearly the future, and this was an opportunity for me to be part of helping to found something and create something that might carry us into the next generation.”

He then quit First Look a few months later before publishing a single word after it transpired that Omidyar's management style made it impossible for First Look's journalists to do their job. Again, Taibbi had no reason whatsoever to suspect that Omidyar—who had been investigated by Congress and sued for "stock spinning" IPOs with Goldman Sachs—had anything in common with every other billionaire he’d ripped apart.

So how is it possible that Omidyar fooled so many of America's best and brightest reporters? To answer that question, we need look no further than the explanation given by Glenn Greenwald to the Washington Post. To Greenwald and his fellow 21st Century Ida Tarbells, the fact that Omidyar hired them was proof positive that he was a good egg:

Pierre is adamant that he wants to support independent journalists and exert no editorial control of any kind over what they write. Everything I’ve seen has been consistent with that. The most compelling proof of his authenticity is that he has thus far hired exactly those journalists who have proven themselves the most unwilling to accept any sort of control – from Jeremy Scahill to Laura Poitras to Matt Taibbi and plenty of others. Pierre is well aware of the fact that none of them would tolerate for even a second having anyone tell them what they are or are not permitted to write about.

So when longtime Intercept investigative reporter Silverstein realized that Omidyar and his pals "were shockingly disinterested in the actual journalism" how can we possibly blame him for being duped? How could he possibly have known?

Like many of you, we at Pando are deeply disturbed by the sight of Omidyar fooling so many journalistic superstars. What’s done is done, of course, but hopefully we can save what’s left of journalism. To that end, we've produced the following handy Pierre Primer, ready to be cut out and pasted on the walls of First Look Media where it can easily be read by new hires...