I had a bit of fun a couple months back with the New York Times' raging anti-Amazon bias, pointing out that the Times' attacks on the Internet retailer stepped up in frequency and strength after Jeff Bezos purchased the Times' biggest competitor, the Washington Post. The Times' much-feted magnum opus against Amazon was little more than a collection of complaints from people who didn't want to work hard and were therefore unable to hack it at Amazon, a company that expects people to work hard.
Turns out that opus had some flaws. Amazon's Jay Carney (formerly Barack Obama's Jay Carney!) explains why over at Medium. You should read the whole thing, but here's a highlight:
If you read the recent New York Times article about Amazon’s culture, you remember that quote. Attributed to Bo Olson, the image of countless employees crying at their desks set the tone for a front-page story that other media outlets described as "scathing," "blistering," "brutal" and "harsh." Olson’s words were so key to the narrative the Times wished to construct that they splashed them in large type just below the headline.
Here’s what the story didn’t tell you about Mr. Olson: his brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted it and resigned immediately.
Needless to say, this wasn't disclosed* in the Times' piece. And there are a number of other interesting little tidbits that don't hold up to scrutiny on closer examination.
But none of this is terribly surprising. One of the authors of the Times' lengthy hit piece on Amazon is the person who has authored numerous other, shorter hit pieces on Amazon. David Streitfeld's archive is littered with anti-Amazon articles featuring headlines like "Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon's E-Book Tactics." He's aces on the "slagging the Times' competitor's owner's other company" beat. Can't be topped.
For what it's worth, I could not care less about how Amazon treats its white collar workers. Whatever they're doing there seems to be working: I get my goods cheaply and quickly and with virtually no effort on my part. That's literally all I, as a voracious consumer, care about. You could power the site via unicorn horns ground up and mixed with orphan tears and I'd keep shopping there. So I'm probably not the sort of bleeding heart that the NYT is trying to convince to give up shopping at Amazon. But the rest of you bleeding hearts who care about things like "workers" or "the mental health of others" should take note just how shoddy the Times' jihad against Amazon is.
*My own disclosure: In addition to buying a ton of stuff from Amazon—I'm currently waiting on delivery of a copy of Richard Schickel's biography of Elia Kazan—I write a weekly essay for the Washington Post's website.