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Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

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Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#131

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

DarknessFalls wrote: post #129
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dug through my hdd and for the life of my I could not find the ones I was thinking of ( maybe it is time to finally tag my stuff properly ). I looked online and I was only able to find one example of what I was thinking of ( https://awwmemes.com/i/spreads-message-of-anti-capitalism-fr... ). The one I remember was equally silly along the lines of "hates banks, uses money = hypocrite". I will keep digging, because I…

Wait, are you saying this meme that you posted comes from the banks during the height of the Occupy movement? Or if not, how did their talking points / PR reach the undiscriminating masses and become this? I remember this meme, but always assumed it came from Apple-haters or unsophisticated Fox News types.

I am not saying that I know for a fact that this particular meme was concocted by a PR firm, blessed by an internal department and rolled out on imgur, 9gag, 4chan and anywhere else it could find fertile ground. I do not have access to that kind of records. That said, by now it is publicly available knowledge that lobbying firms were proposing ways to handle OWS(1).

I do remember it popping up in a lot of places with anti-OWS message and I just found it interesting in terms of timing and how the subject was basically designed to be hated at the time. Like I said, it is this meme template. I can't find the one with exact wording, which is why it got my attention back then. It does not help that I don't remember the exact phrase.

I will add as a general note that memes are ridiculously easy to create and disseminate en masse. You can obviously create metric ton of variants and see what sticks best. To your point, they can be done Fox News types, Apple-haters, dog-lovers, apple pickers, you name it and tracking its origin can be genuinely hard.

1.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2063843/Occupy-Wall...

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#132

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

ric2b wrote: post #127
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dug through my hdd and for the life of my I could not find the ones I was thinking of ( maybe it is time to finally tag my stuff properly ). I looked online and I was only able to find one example of what I was thinking of ( https://awwmemes.com/i/spreads-message-of-anti-capitalism-fr... ). The one I remember was equally silly along the lines of "hates banks, uses money = hypocrite". I will keep digging, because I…

Those are extremely lazy and I don't understand how someone takes them seriously. It's like saying: "Kidnapped victim runs away by shooting the captor's knee... with the captor's gun, hypocrite much?!"

You would be surprised how much you of what you see around you, you internalize.

The message sticks with you. Look at me. It has been years now and I just remember the message despite not remembering the exact words.

Just for that reason alone I was surprised/grateful, I did not see that great a push from ad industry to use memes yet. There are clearly some thinly disguised ads, but the various communities tends to weed them out fast.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#133

Post by choward »

throwanem wrote: post #104
oh_sigh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No guilt at all - mostly ambivalence. It was actually my idea to put it into the specific product, but it's not like I invented the technique or anything. It was only one small thing I worked on, 98% of my time was on something else. I think the ability to leak information about the wrongdoing of corporations or governments is extremely important, but most of the leaks I see coming out of the tech industry seem desig…

Having done the same kind of work - yeah, that. For every Edward Snowden, there's at least ten thousand Frank Underwoods and Michael Scotts.

This is the difference between leaking and whistleblowing. Leaking is for one's own personal benefit. Whistleblowing is to expose something you feel is wrong for no personal gain.

I wouldn't call this a leak unless the news agency paid him or something else that benefited him.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#134

Post by DubiousPusher »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #121
downerending wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but it was my impression that quality journalism was generally the case in the 1980s (in the US at least). What I was reading then certainly seemed to be. Separation of church and state was taken very seriously. These days, you can't start with the assumption that a story is written to J standards. Rather, you need to start with the assumption that it's pushing narrative, and hope to be surprised.

There never was such a thing as neutral, factual reporting. Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications. The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism. The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand. Fore…

See, I agree with everything up to that last sentence. Because from what I can tell most people who say that just have a different idea of which media outlets that are the problem.

I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.

Our old media system had the benefit that it helped create a fairly singular truth for people to follow. But it created what I think was equal to the massive lying you are concerned about by just not reporting on lots of stuff.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-doe...

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#135

Post by ape4 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #53
barryrandall wrote: post #8

This Vice story is just part of the smear campaign. Strategy: “We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire un…

“I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me.” What a pathetic excuse from the General Counsel of one of the world's most powerful firms when caught engaging in employee retaliation. This isn't acceptable from any lawyer.

Not smart or articulate.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#137

Post by downerending »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #134
CaptainZapp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There never was such a thing as neutral, factual reporting. Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications. The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism. The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand. Fore…

See, I agree with everything up to that last sentence. Because from what I can tell most people who say that just have a different idea of which media outlets that are the problem. I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sa…

> They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.

I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)

The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#138

Post by downerending »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #102
malandrew wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back before collecting and disseminating information rapidly became a commodity. So basically before CNN approximately and definitely before blogs. There's not a specific moment in time. There are specific innovations that accelerated and commodified the dissemination of facts, which each contributing to this decline in journalistic integrity and greater faithfulness to facts.

So I watched the Cronkite stuff and it seems pretty similar to this. https://youtu.be/VDv3_KfdBs4 So is your gripe generally applies to all contemporary journalism or specifically with CNN and Fox News? Isn't it just as likely that legacy news sources are still doing the news pretty much the way they always have but that the availability of alternative sources has allowed people to diverge their opinion from a mainst…

CNN is certainly doing things far differently than it did in the early days. It might not have been Reuters, but it was still quite neutral and of good journalistic quality. (These days it seems more reminiscent of Jerry Springer.)

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#139

Post by downerending »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #78
downerending wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely was bias then, but it was far more limited (with a few scandalous exceptions). As an example, TV news couldn't strongly push an agenda lest they risk losing their broadcast license. Mixing church and state at the NYT was a great way to get fired. More personally, I took a J class during this period and wrote for a school newspaper. The instructor talked about J standards the way NRA instructors talk…

You really don't think they teach the same high-minded stuff in journalism classes these days? I would bet you that if you sat in on meetings at the NYT or broadcast news outlets you would hear the exact same kind of intent as you attribute to them in yesteryear. I could be wrong but I think the far bigger difference from then to today is not the quality of the journalism out of mainstream outlets but that the pletho…

I'm not sure. Simple mechanics like writing a good lede or headline seem to have almost disappeared.

And it seems to have become acceptable (on both left and right) for a news room to try to "get" a sitting President that they don't like, even if the result is sloppy journalism.

My impressions is that serious retractions (or worse, serious errors without retractions) are far more common now than thirty years ago.

As for MLK, even knowing what we do now, I still consider him a hero. But yeah, journalistic coverage of him back then was pretty uncritical.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer

#140

Post by pas »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #131
DarknessFalls wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you saying this meme that you posted comes from the banks during the height of the Occupy movement? Or if not, how did their talking points / PR reach the undiscriminating masses and become this? I remember this meme, but always assumed it came from Apple-haters or unsophisticated Fox News types.

I am not saying that I know for a fact that this particular meme was concocted by a PR firm, blessed by an internal department and rolled out on imgur, 9gag, 4chan and anywhere else it could find fertile ground. I do not have access to that kind of records. That said, by now it is publicly available knowledge that lobbying firms were proposing ways to handle OWS(1). I do remember it popping up in a lot of places with…

It's more likely that voluntarists/ancaps/libertarians made the meme than some PR firm, no?
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