Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

about.van.fedex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 321 posts

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#41

Post by callmeal »

sarcasmatwork wrote: post #2

Expected behavior coming from New York Times. Good on Fedex for pushing back.

Lets look at the facts as reported by the NYT: 1. Fedex owed 1.5 Billion in taxes in 2017. 2. They owe 0 in taxes after the bill. 3. As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. Much of its savings have gone to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.

They are not disputing those numbers at all.

What they want to do is "The focus of the debate should be federal tax policy and the relative societal benefits of business investments and the enormous intended benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners."

Bet seeing those numbers (2017 Tax bill: $1,500,000,000, 2018 tax bill: $0) must have stung and Fedex is frantically trying to change the topic of conversation.

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#42

Post by nkrisc »

sarcasmatwork wrote: post #2

Expected behavior coming from New York Times. Good on Fedex for pushing back.

But based on the this statement, I'm inclined to believe that everything the NYT published was, in fact, true. No where in the statement does it call into question any of the facts, just calling it an "outrageous distortion" of the truth. Which implies it is true, though he certainly takes issue with the characterization of the truth.

So if expected behavior of the NYT is factual reporting, I'd say they're on the money!

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#43

Post by burkaman »

appleiigs wrote: post #31
scott_s wrote: post #20

This statement is a farce. They claim the story is factually incorrect, but provide no corrections. They point out the NYT does the same thing, but that does not contradict anything in the NYT article, and has no bearing on what they did. Finally, they yell "debate me!" but rather than proposing a debate on the facts in dispute, instead want to debate federal tax policy which neither controls.

I think it's a great statement. They aren't disputing the facts. Fedex is disputing that cutting taxes is a bad thing and is saying lets talk about it. EDIT: and as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.

> They aren't disputing the facts.

> The New York Times published a distorted and factually incorrect story [...] this outrageous distortion of the truth [...]

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#44

Post by slg »

appleiigs wrote: post #31
scott_s wrote: post #20

This statement is a farce. They claim the story is factually incorrect, but provide no corrections. They point out the NYT does the same thing, but that does not contradict anything in the NYT article, and has no bearing on what they did. Finally, they yell "debate me!" but rather than proposing a debate on the facts in dispute, instead want to debate federal tax policy which neither controls.

I think it's a great statement. They aren't disputing the facts. Fedex is disputing that cutting taxes is a bad thing and is saying lets talk about it. EDIT: and as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.

>They aren't disputing the facts.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. The first sentence says the story is "distorted and factually incorrect" and they later call it an "outrageous distortion of the truth". This statement is screaming "fake news" and "debate me" like some Twitter troll. It is crazy to see this as an official statement from a Fortune 100 company.

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#45

Post by mmazing »

chrismeller wrote: post #9
mmazing wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

Not OP, but I’ll take a stab at it: he’s saying that the NYT is overly liberal, frequently trashes businesses as being tax evaders and plagues on society, misses its own hypocrisy, and doesn’t live up to its historical pedigree when it comes to fact checking.

There, that wasn't so hard.

Take a lesson, OP, list specific verifiable arguments instead of ad hominem "yeah those guys suck as usual".

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#46

Post by nkrisc »

mc32 wrote: post #28
scott_s wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists and editors should not let the business practices of the paper they work for prevent them from investigating and publishing stories. This is a feature , not a bug.

If they are going to do that, I’d expect disclosure: “Your revered newspaper is misrepresenting facts and also does worse than the entity we’re calling out”. Or at least “We also do the things we call others out on.”

Which facts about FedEx were misrepresented?

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#47

Post by bridanp »

jobu wrote: post #32
rahimnathwani wrote: post #4

Response to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/business/how-fedex-cut-it...

From the NYTimes article: > In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. > Its financial filings show it owed no taxes in the 2018 fiscal year overall. Company officials said FedEx paid $2 billion in total federal income taxes over the past 10 years. So in the last 10 years FedEx paid $2B in taxes, of which $1.5B was paid in 2017. That seems really weird. Does a…

Page 60 of their 2019 annual report will show you (link below). The TCJA (Tax Cut/Job Act) removed $1.354 billion from what they were expected to pay. They had several other benefits against their overall tax rate, but that was by far the highest in 2018. It lead to them owing -5% in taxes or $219 million.

http://s1.q4cdn.com/714383399/files/doc_financials/annual/20...

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#48

Post by blhack »

fooqux wrote: post #13
rahimnathwani wrote: post #4

Response to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/business/how-fedex-cut-it...

Too bad it's impossible to read because of multiple overlays. I guess I'll take FedEx's word for it.

Disable javascript and your time on the internet will improve substantially.

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#49

Post by panarky »

CPLX wrote: post #25

This is stupid. The NY Times, as a business, wasn't a subject of the article. It's not a competition between a media company and a shipping company. It's a piece of journalism. Either that journalism is accurate or it isn't. If it's wrong they should issue a correction, or review how it could be misleading or slanted and offer an alternate perspective. If it's correct they should stand by it. In no event does the wri…

The FedEx statement seems like a classic example of corporate deception. It seems very carefully worded, probably by a team of attorneys, to be technically true but grossly misleading.

The tell is that FedEx calls the NYT article "factually incorrect" but never states exactly what assertions they dispute.

It's as if they want the reader and the media to infer that FedEx actually did pay taxes on billions in profit, or that FedEx actually did increase their investments as the phony rationale for the tax cut promised.

But since FedEx never actually says any of that, and instead just tries to infer it through clever wording, I'm going to trust NYT over this corporate snow job.

When FedEx twists the argument to accuse the NYT of also not increasing their capital investments, the whole thing reeks of Facebook's disinfo campaign to "deny and deflect" fundamentally factual reporting.

Re: FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

#50

Post by at-fates-hands »

Shivetya wrote: post #14
mmazing wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

NYT and a few other papers are pretty much running in campaign mode, floating trial balloons of policy ideas of candidates they favor if not outright pushing forward a narrative which aligns with the direction one campaign or another is following. So stories align to support the narrative. The 2020 narrative for the Democratic Party is again wealth envy and how all the woes can be solved if X just pays their fair sha…

Agreed.

Anything not dealing with politics is pretty decent, but nearly everything they print now has to have some political slant or cheap shot at the current administration.

I remember reading a recent article about the drought in California. Pretty well written article, but of course about midway through the article there were two paragraphs highlighting Trump's opinion that climate change isn't real, blah blah blah. Even though the whole mess has been a direct result of the state government completely mismanaging their own resources.

It's no wonder most people on the right just completely discount them now as a reliable new source. It wasn't always the case, but from the time of the beginning of the 2016 election to now, it's all been downhill.

Post reply on HN