Amazon is still pretty mad about that New York Times story

Why is the company now reminding everyone of the scandal by putting up a blog post two months later?

Updated with response from the New York Times

Hey, remember that scathing report in the New York Times, put out in August, in which the paper accused Amazon, and its CEO Jeff Bezos, of acting harshly and cruelly toward its workers?

Admit it, you probably forgot about it until right now. We live in a hyperactive news cycle, and most people aren't going to be thinking of a story two months later unless they have a reason to. The story, for all intents and purposes, had blown over, at least from a PR standpoint.

So why, dare I ask, is Amazon bringing it up again? Why did Jay Carney, former White House Press Secretary and Amazon’s current senior vice president for global corporate affairs, just write a long blog post on Medium refuting the Times' story?

One of Carney's biggest targets in his piece is Bo Olson, who worked for Amazon for less than two years in a book marketing role and is quoted in the New York Times piece as saying that, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

"Here’s what the story didn’t tell you about Mr. Olson: his brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted it and resigned immediately," Carney wrote.

Another employee, Chris Brucia, who working on a new fashion sale site, said that he was berated for a half an hour on all of the things he was doing wrong, before being promoted.

According to Carney, Brucia also received a written review, which was more positive. How this negates the otherwise extremely harsh treatment is not exactly clear. In neither of these cases foes Carney actually dispute what was said; he instead goes after the employees themselves for not giving the full story.

Even more than those ex-employees who spoke out, Carney's real targets are the Times itself and the two authors of the piece: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, who communicated regularly with Amazon, but "never found the time, or inclination, to ask us about the credibility of a named source whose vivid quote would serve as a lynchpin for the entire piece."

"Even with breaking news, journalistic standards would encourage working hard to uncover any bias in a key source. With six months to work on the story, journalistic standards absolutely require it," Carney said.

The Times also has a history of going after Amazon, and of being called out for "bias and hype in their coverage of Amazon," which has apparently happened two times in the last year.

The most amazing part of this whole thing is that Carney actually published an email that Kantor wrote to Craig Berman, Amazon's vice president of public relations, in which she specifically says that the story will not become "a stack of negative anecdotes from ex-Amazonians," and that, if it were to be that, she would come to the company for responses. 

Does that e-mail exchange make The Times, or Kantor, look good? No, of course it doesn't. It makes it seem as though she was misleading the company on what kind of story she was going to write, which may be unethical, and is, at the very least, a little slimy.

At end of the piece, Carney explains the timing of his blog post by explaining that Amazon had "presented the Times with our findings several weeks ago, hoping they might take action to correct the record. They haven’t, which is why we decided to write about it ourselves."

However Carney's entire blog post feels off, mostly for the fact that, in refuting a story that accuses Amazon of being too hard on its workers, Carney spends his time specifically going after former employees who dared speak out against their former employer. Again, who thought this was a good idea?

It's also not as though Amazon was silent on the issue until now. Jeff Bezos responded to it the very next day after it came out, denying the worst aspects of the story..

"The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day," he said.

"The article goes further than reporting isolated anecdotes. It claims that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard. Again, I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either."

The Times article was a chink in Amazon's armor, a story that perminently hurt its reputation and probably lost it some customers. The last thing it should be doing now is reminding people of its fumble. This is an unforced error, and it does not make the company look good at all.

VatorNews reached out to Amazon, but a company spokesperson declined to comment further.

Update:

Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of The New York Time, has also taken to Medium to respond to, and refute, Carney's blog post. 

(Image source: tumblr.com)