Online retailing giant Amazon is going to war with the New York Times over an unflattering exposé published two months ago, and former White House spokesman Jay Carney is leading the charge.
The Times alleged in a 5,700-word-plus article, titled “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” that the tech giant suffers from an extreme dog-eat-dog culture, one where employees are often reduced to weeping uncontrollably at their desks. The heavily sourced Times article cites several former Amazon employees who paint the company as a deeply unhappy and “bruising workplace.”
Carney, who joined Amazon earlier this year as senior vice president for global corporate affairs, finally fired back Monday, claiming that the newspaper failed to mention that many of the former employees quoted in the story allegedly have an “axe to grind.”
“Journalism 101 instructs that facts should be checked and sources should be vetted. When there are two sides of a story, a reader deserves to know them both. Why did the Times choose not to follow standard practice here? We don’t know,” he wrote in a blog post Monday.
“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. It might not have merited the front page, but it would have been closer to the truth,” he added.
Prior to serving as the lead spokesman for the Obama administration, Carney was the Washington Bureau Chief for Time magazine.
Carney also claimed in his blog post that the lead Times reporter, Jodi Kantor, misled Amazon about her intentions when she prepped the story.
“We decided to participate by sharing much of what Ms. Kantor asked for, yet the article she specifically said they were not writing became the article that we all read,” he wrote. “And, despite our months-long participation, we were given no opportunity to see, respond to, or help fact-check the ‘stack of negative anecdotes’ that they ultimately used.”
Most unfortunate of all, he concluded, is that the Times has so far refused to update or correct its story even after Amazon approached it with supposedly telling details about the newspaper’s quoted sources.
“We 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,” wrote.
“The Times got attention for their story, but in the process they did a disservice to readers, who deserve better,” he added.
Not one to take criticism lightly, Times executive editor Dean Baquet responded Monday in a blog post of his own, affirming that the newspaper stands by its reporting.
“We have reviewed notes from Ms. Kantor’s communications with your team. The topics discussed relatively early on included Amazon’s reputation as a difficult place to work, social cohesion, complaints of a culture of criticism and other worker concerns that were emerging from the reporting,” he wrote.
“I should point out that you said to me that you always assumed this was going to be a tough story, so it is hard to accept that Amazon was expecting otherwise. As I said in the beginning, this story was based on dozens of interviews. And any reading of the responses leaves no doubt that this was an accurate portrait,” he added, suggesting that the paper has no intention of issuing any corrections or editors notes.
Later, on Monday, Carney responded to Baquet’s response.
“The bottom line is the New York Times chose not to fact-check or vet its most important on-the-record sources, despite working on the story for six months,” he wrote in a second blog post. “I really don’t see a defensible explanation for that failure.”
He reiterated his criticism that the paper failed “to check the stories of their most critical on-the-record sources.”
“And since they didn’t bother to check or vet the anecdotes and quotes from sources willing to go on the record, how much credibility should readers assign to all the anecdotes and quotes in the story from anonymous sources, the ones no one can check even now?” he asked.
He concluded, “Reporters like to joke about stories and anecdotes that are ‘too good to check.’ But the joke is really a warning. When an anecdote or quote is too good to check, it’s usually too good to be true.”
