I think it's a great statement. They aren't disputing the facts. Fedex is disputing that cutting taxes is a bad thing and is saying lets talk about it.
EDIT: and as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.
EDIT: and as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.
I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. The first sentence says the story is "distorted and factually incorrect" and they later call it an "outrageous distortion of the truth". This statement is screaming "fake news" and "debate me" like some Twitter troll. It is crazy to see this as an official statement from a Fortune 100 company.
No it's not—the era of "journalists" being de facto arbiters of truth is most definitely over.
> The New York Times published a distorted and factually incorrect story [...] this outrageous distortion of the truth [...]
Perhaps not individually, but a thrust of the article is that these large corporations pay huge amounts to lobbyists to bend tax policy in their favor.
> ese large corporations pay huge amounts to lobbyists to bend tax policy in their favor.
Do we have a way to know if fedex did this?
This is answered in the first paragraph of the nytimes article: "In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard."
That is incorrect. According to the article FedEx is referencing [1], the NY Times wrote that FedEx (along with UPS) met regularly with Congressional committee staff who were writing the tax policy and pushed hard for their own agenda.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/business/how-fedex-cut-it...
FedEx spent $10 million on lobbying in 2017, in line with previous spending, with much of it focused on tax issues, according to federal records. Its team pushed hard to shape the bill behind the scenes, meeting regularly with House and Senate committee staff who were writing the provisions.
Mr. Smith met with Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in February 2017, and on May 26 he spoke on the phone with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, according to Mr. Mnuchin’s public calendar.
EDIT: correcting formatting issues.
Maybe we’ll finally get out of the one sided shouting matches that modern journalism seems to encourage.