Wolff: The empire tries to strike back

Two months ago, The New York Times published the results of an investigation of Amazon’s work environment, finding it to be quite the meanest company of the tech era, regularly reducing many of its employees to tears. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and its new PR chief, former Obama White House spokesman Jay Carney, immediately and volubly protested this characterization.

Last week, obviously still smarting, the company once again responded to the Times’ investigation, this time with its own investigation of Amazon employees or former employees who were quoted in the article about instances of Amazon’s harshness.

What The New York Times Didn't Tell You

The world of journalists and PR professionals uttered a collective, “Huh?” Evident to everybody familiar with the stagecraft of crisis management, something had gone seriously and weirdly off the rails.

Amazon, New York Times face off on Medium over article

For one thing, although the Times’ report might have been juicily melodramatic, Amazon is known to everybody in the tech business as a terrible pressure cooker. The Times’ story, however inconvenient to Amazon, was just saying the obvious.

For another, it would be hard to imagine a better way to demonstrate your heartlessness and ruthlessness — true, steamrolling, flatten-anybody-in-your-way-ness — than an attempted public assassination of your internal critics. What’s more, this came in a statement, or “article,” written by Carney himself — that is, the PR guy was both wounded party and avenging angel.

Notably, Carney’s attack and rebuttal were posted on Medium, an open publishing platform — i.e. anybody can publish on it — that corporate communication professionals use only when there are no other reputable op-ed or public forum outlets to publish the company spin. Indeed, any minimally libel-and-privacy-conscious publisher with the most basic fact-checking standards would have reasonably balked at publishing such a sour-grapes, scream-of-rage attack by an employer on specifically named employees.

This was nutty.

Oh, and the Times, hardly skipping a beat, quickly published its rejoinder on Medium, as though not wanting to sully its own pages. Even granting the facts of Carney’s charges against the various aggrieved Amazon employees, the Times’ response, by Executive Editor Dean Baquet, easily demolished almost all issues related to the Times’ methods and bias. Amazon’s defense, probably involving two months of paranoid effort and significant intra-office resources, didn’t last a day. It did, on the other hand, have the effect of reviving all the details of the original story, which otherwise had quite substantially receded.

Rieder: The New York Times hammers Amazon

Perhaps it was Carney.

He is part of a cadre of senior-most political operatives who have transferred out of Washington and into top-level, multimillion-dollar communication jobs in the tech industry. The popularity of political press people has lots to do with their Washington clout and the increasing pressure of regulatory issues facing tech companies. Their downside is that they can bring a hit-them-again-harder political campaign war footing to ordinary PR skirmishes.

PR skirmishes often escalate quickly in the tech world, where tech reporters are overly dependent on the goodwill of tech executives. David Streitfeld, one of the two Times reporters who wrote the story, has long covered Amazon. As in politics, bad press in the tech industry is often seen as a betrayal rather than fair and inevitable back and forth. There was certainly a personal cast to the Carney post, which quoted at length from an email written by the other Times reporter on the story, Jodi Kantor, reassuring the company about the fair-mindedness of the Times’ intentions. (The opposite email would seem highly unusual: A news organization asking for cooperation to expose a company’s dubious practices.) Probably Amazon thought the reporters were in the bag and were stunned and furious to find out otherwise.

Still.

The two months of pent-up fury and corporate fire and brimstone made it seem even more exceptionally personal than rogue reporters slipping out of the PR embrace. Rather, the Carney response felt like an emotional defense of the company. It felt existential rather than strategic.

It did not feel like a professional’s response. It felt like somebody, even after two months' delay, after the cooling-off period, was still furiously angry, and, perhaps in spite of cooler heads, insisting that the professionals carry out their duty.

I do not know if over the past two months, Bezos found that he could think of little other than The New York Times’ temerity. But tech founders seem uniquely prone to getting mad and to getting even. Accustomed to being bathed in good press, their brains appear to come loose with anything bad.

Not incidentally, in an ongoing experiment matching the temperament of a billionaire tech mogul with the inclinations of a skeptical press, Bezos owns The Washington Post. This dust-up cannot be reassuring to anybody hoping the experiment turns out well.

Then there is Medium and the premise that it ought to be easy for anybody to publish whatever they want. Be careful what you wish for.