What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

Jay Carney did an excellent job debunking it; however, it's much like debunking a Buzzfeed article. You might come out ahead logically, but that isn't what people are going to be talking about. The NYT isn't going for truth, they need people to read their newspaper, and then talk about it so they decided to write a bad article about Amazon, and then they found the "sources" for it.

Back to the Amazon thing you're discussing, while I'm sure it's a high pressure workplace that isn't suited for everyone, the Times piece was as sensationalized if not moreso than the rebuff here. The rebuff I'm sure is biased to the company. As with most things, the truth isn't on either side, it's somewhere in the middle, though frankly the matter of fact stating and the clear context of the Amazon rebuff does ring true-r to me, but that's only IMHO.

Yep. Additionally, its pretty clear Carney was hired as a political PR wrangler for the sole purpose of cleaning up messes like this and this is the best he can do.

If it was someone inexperienced, I'd assume this was just an error in judgement. However, with Carney's experience, is pretty clear this is the best spin that could be put to paper ... and that really says something. Their only option is to attack the character of the people involved in the articles about Amazon. They have no data, no evidence of any kind beyond "These are bad people".

For a data driven company, it shows they either failed to collect related data and/or that data shows the article was accurate despite the poor choice of sources.

> (By the way, the tool that the Times suggests is institutional encouragement to anonymously stab people in the back is rarely used and, when it is, most feedback is positive. Also, it’s not anonymous. The reporters knew that and dropped some qualifying language deep in the story after painting a picture that was far more entertaining than accurate.)

Yeah, I'll believe if you if you were able to quantify it. The fact you didn't even try to provide data for this claim causes me call bullshit.

> 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. 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.

Then provide data, rather than anecdotes of your own that show you in an even more negative light among the privacy minded?

At this phase, where the story has run and the damage has been done -- the response should be done by Carney. Take the rebuttal to Mr. Olson, for example. That revelation is absolutely not something that should be revealed by Mr. Olson's boss or a coworker. First of all, just because you're an engineer doesn't mean you have all of the facts. The PR person is in a position to collect the facts, including whether or not it's legal to reveal Mr. Olson's reason for termination, and confirming that reason for termination with HR. Even Mr. Olson's boss wouldn't have that same level of confirmation.

The other advantage of having Carney make this response is that you can be sure that this is, for better or worse, the official company response. If instead, this was a blog post by Mr. Olson's co-worker calling him out for being a fraud...and the reaction to it was negative...then Amazon could pedal back and say, "Oh well that co-worker blogged something he shouldn't have and now he is being punished".

But since the condemnation of Mr. Olson has come straight from Mr. Carney, any backlash will be rightly the reaping of what Bezos, Carney, and all their lawyers have sowed.

edit: FWIW, a non-anonymous redditor is saying that he knows Bo Olson, personally, and says "I can assure you that Bo was not the one defrauding vendors that was another employee in the same department"...it strikes me as improbable that Carney (again, not just Carney, but Amazon's lawyers and HR) would get this wrong. But if they did...it's going to be a great backlash, and a much more lasting one than had this allegation come from someone other than Carney or Bezos himself.

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