Former White House press secretary and current Amazon senior vice president of corporate affairs Jay Carney has taken to Medium to rip the New York Times’ now famous, front page investigative feature, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.”
“The Times got attention for their story, but in the process they did a disservice to readers, who deserve better,” Carney writes.
It is Carney’s first medium post in the role of Amazon executive and he’s taken the opportunity to argue the Times’ “bias and hype[d]” coverage. Carney’s response, and the evidence he presents, is damning. Among the many discrepancies that Carney addresses, numerous named sources apparently had an “axe to grind” and/or produced misleading or dubious information.
First, an important source for the story, former Amazon site merchandiser Bo Olson, who produced the memorable quote “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” resigned after an internal investigation revealed he had attempted to “defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records.” Olson resigned during the investigation. This seemingly important detail, however, is not mentioned by Times.
In another case, Elizabeth Willet, an Amazon employee who said she was “strafed” by Amazon’s internal, employee-submitted Anytime Feedback tool, received just three pieces of feedback via the tool during her tenure and all three were reportedly positive.
"The Times got attention for their story, but in the process they did a disservice to readers, who deserve better”
Carney also says that this internal tool is disingenuously described by the Times as an “institutional encouragement to anonymously stab people in the back.” But in reality, the tool is not anonymous and the majority of inputted feedback is supposedly positive in nature.
In essence, reporters Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, who spent six months dedicated to the report, did not verify certain claims with Amazon’s PR team, Carney says. And as a result, it led to an article focused on the culture of Amazon that is misleading, Amazon’s senior vice president of corporate affairs claims.
It’s worth noting that this response comes more than 2 months after the original NYT article was published, and it’s interesting to see that Amazon chose to leverage Carney’s D.C. profile to produce publicity. It’s also unclear exactly how Amazon has been arguing claims produced by the article since its publication.
According to Carney, Amazon provided the Times their findings several weeks ago hoping that the legendary newspaper would correct the record. They have not, and so Amazon decided to “write about it ourselves.”
“We were in regular communication with Ms. Kantor from February through the publication date in mid-August. And yet somehow she 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,” Carney said.
When it was originally published on August 15, the NYT’s article became a headline defining story that garnered millions of social media shares and thousands of comments. Today, the article has more than 5,500 comments on the Times’ digital publication. It even caused Amazon CEO/founder Jeff Bezos to write a memorable, companywide email asking employees to bring up their concerns directly to potentially improve conditions.
The subsequent coverage from numerous news publications focused on the state of workers’ privileges in what has come to be known as a high stress, exhaustive, “bruising” and life consuming workplace fostered by rising technology companies. Outside of the original story’s direct influence on Amazon, it also seemingly became illustrative of the state of workers in the contemporary technology industry: starved of basic necessities in the grandiose pursuit for innovation.
According to the former White House press secretary, there are other falsehoods and mistakes throughout the article, but he held back by just naming a few key notes. Carney, previously the Washington bureau chief for Time Magazine, finishes his counter article by exclaiming “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. It might not have merited the front page, but it would have been closer to the truth.”
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Update: The New York Times has responded to Carney’s criticism in another Medium post written by executive editor Dean Baquet. The full response can be read HERE.
Update II: Carney, in a second post, has shot down Baquest's defense of the article.
