It took several months, but Amazon is taking the gloves off in its fight against the New York Times and the paper’s stinging summer report about the e-commerce giant’s work culture.
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Can you imagine what it would be like if Brian Moynihan went on his blog every time he and BofA got rapped on the knuckles by a news organization?
The New York Times has not yet responded to The Hollywood Reporter’s request for comment on Carney’s piece.
In a blog post published on Medium on Monday morning, Amazon communications head Jay Carney disputed a few facts, highlighted what he views as missing context and dug up details about a few of the former Amazon employees quoted in the piece.
Carney leads off by revealing Bo Olson, a former Amazon employee quoted in the article as saying almost everyone he saw cried at their desk, resigned from the company after admitting to defrauding vendors.
Two months is an awfully long time to take in responding to a newspaper story.
At the time, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defended his company, but only in vague terms, not addressing the specifics of the story.
“When the story came out, we knew it misrepresented Amazon”, said Carney, a former White House spokesman who previously worked as a journalist at Time (Xetra: 17T.Delaware – news) magazine. He said the worker who panned Amazon’s anonymous “Anytime Feedback” tool, which the Times said allowed workers to chide each other for not working hard enough, only received three reviews, all positive. The Times, though, hasn’t issued one.
“What we do know is, had the reporters checked their facts, the story they published would have been a lot less sensational, a lot more balanced, and, let’s be honest, a lot more boring”, Carney wrote. It might not have merited the front page, but it would have been closer to the truth.
‘Through those conversations, we were repeatedly assured that this would be a nuanced story that dove into what makes Amazon an exciting and fun place to be, not just a demanding place to work.
Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment. Instead, we’re given a political attack ad-style innuendos: If Bo Olson did THIS, can you really trust Bo Olson? Thinking back, I hope I accomplished two things in particular.
In it, she tells PR vice president Craig Berman that “this story will express that Amazon has a somewhat counterintuitive theory of management that really works”. We’ve had so much Trump since then, and playoff baseball!
Baquet opened his response by restating his support for Jodi Kantor’s piece: “Our reporters spoke to more than a hundred current and former employees, at various levels and divisions, over many months”, he wrote.
“They haven’t”, he added, “which is why we chose to write about it ourselves”. Somebody said to me in the course of reporting, this is the only place where I’ve worked where you don’t look around a conference room and say, “How did that guy get hired?”
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“Many, including most of those you cited, talked about how they admired Amazon’s ambitions and urgency even as they described aspects of the workplace as troubling”. The negative material is very troubling. A third, Julia Cheiffetz, wrote in Medium, about being sidelined after having a child and being diagnosed with cancer. But I do sort of feel like the story attempted to portray the best of Amazon.
