7/19/2020 Amazon Launches a Scathing Response to Times Story - The Atlantic

BUSINESS
A Blistering Response From Amazon
But e New York Times defended its story about the work culture at the online retailer.
KRISHNADEV CALAMUR OCTOBER 19, 2015

TED S. WARREN/ AP

Updated on October 19 at 3:15 p.m. ET

Amazon says a New York Times story from August about what it’s like to work at the
online retailer “misrepresented” the company. In a scathing response, Amazon says it
presented its ndings to the newspaper several weeks ago, “hoping they might take
action to correct the record. ey haven’t, which is why we decided to write about it
ourselves.” Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, in a response reiterated his
“support for our story about Amazon’s culture.”

e piece, published in Medium, is written by Jay Carney, the former White House
spokesman who now serves as Amazon’s senior vice president for global corporate
affairs. Baquet’s response, in the form of a letter to Carney, was also posted on Medium.

Among the claims made in Amazon’s response: Bo Olson, the former Amazon employee
quoted in the Times story as saying, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at
their desk,” left the company “after an investigation revealed he had attempted to
defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records”; another worker, Elizabeth
Willet, who was quoted as saying she was “strafed” through the company’s feedback
tool, received three pieces of feedback through that tool, including positive feedback;
Dina Vaccari, an Amazon employee quoted in the story saying she didn’t sleep for four
days because of how hard the company wanted its employees to work, now says: “No
one forced me to do this—I chose it and it sucked at the time but in no way was I
asked or forced by management to do this.”

e response speci cally nds fault with the Times’ Jodi Kantor, who spent six months
reporting the story with David Streitfeld, another of the newspaper’s reporters.

“We were in regular communication with Ms. Kantor from February through the
publication date in mid-August,” Carney writes. “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.”

Amazon’s response adds:

In any story, there are matters of opinion and there are issues of fact. And
context is critical. 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. But it’s worth noting that they’ve now twice in less than a
year been called out by their own public editor for bias and hype in their
coverage of Amazon. (Last fall, the public editor wrote a critique of the paper’s
coverage of Amazon’s negotiations with Hachette titled “Publishing Battle

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7/19/2020 Amazon Launches a Scathing Response to Times Story - The Atlantic
Should Be Covered, Not Joined.” And in the wake of the story on Amazon’s
culture, she wrote, “e article was driven less by irrefutable proof than by
generalization and anecdote. For such a damning result, presented with so
much drama, that doesn’t seem like quite enough.”)

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.

e pushback from the company more than two months after the Times published its
story illustrates the level to which Amazon is trying to correct the narrative that
depicted Amazon as a brutal place to work. Here’s an excerpt from the Times story,
that’s fairly typical:

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in

meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text
messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the
company boasts are “unreasonably high.” e internal phone directory instructs
colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees
say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (e tool offers sample texts,
including this: “I felt concerned about his in exibility and openly complaining
about minor tasks.”)

Baquet, in his response, said in the course of the reporting, the Times found patterns:
“many people raised similar concerns.” Here’s more:

Virtually every person quoted in the story stated a view that multiple other
workers had also told us. (Some other workers were not quoted because of
nondisclosure agreements, fear of retribution or because their current
employers were doing business with Amazon.)

And he noted: “e story did not assert that every Amazon employee had a difficult
time there.” Baquet issued a point-by-point rebuttal of every example Carney raised in
his post earlier Monday. Discussing the speci c example of Olson, Baquet wrote:

Olson described con ict and turmoil in his group and a revolving series of
bosses, and acknowledged that he didn’t last there. He disputes Amazon’s
account of his departure, though. He told us today that his division was
overwhelmed and had difficulty meeting its marketing commitments to
publishers; he said he and others in the division could not keep up. But he said
he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or
falsifying records, nor did he admit to that.
If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of
wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was
contested, we would have said so.

Carney replied to Baquet’s letter, saying: “e 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. I really don’t see a defensible explanation for that failure.”

But Amazon, in its posts Monday, did not challenge the other claim made in the Times
story: that Amazon can be a challenging place for its female employees. One female
employee, Molly Jay, who had received high ratings for years, found herself being called
“a problem” after she began traveling to care for her father, who was stricken with
cancer. Another, Michelle Williamson, a 41-year-old mother of three children, was told,
in the words of the newspaper, “that raising children would most likely prevent her
from success at a higher level because of the long hours required.” A third, Julia
Cheiffetz, wrote in Medium, about being sidelined after having a child and being
diagnosed with cancer.

When the story was rst published, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos responded almost
immediately, writing a memo to his company’s 180,000 workers that “e article
doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”

Baquet, writing directly to Carney, added: “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.”

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7/19/2020 Amazon Launches a Scathing Response to Times Story - The Atlantic
Carney’s reply to Baquet: “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.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to
letters@theatlantic.com.

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