Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt.
Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?
I get why “well, journalists never critically report on the people who directly or indirectly sign their paycheck, dontcha know!” is such a popular take (particularly in cynical times with a skeptical crowd), but the history of news shows journalists reporting on things that could potentially piss off their owners pretty repeatedly, and the Washington Post reporting on things relating to Amazon doesn’t seem to be a serious exception.
Amusingly, I just did a DuckDuckGo search on “washington post reporting on amazon”, intending to see if there were critical takes on said reporting, and what came up instead was: a plethora of WaPo articles with headlines like “Bernie Sanders launches investigation into Amazon labor practices”, “Lawmakers: Amazon may have lied to Congress”, “Perspective: How Amazon shopping ads are disguised as real results”, “FTC sues Amazon over Prime enrollment without consent”, “Amazon’s OSHA data shows its workers injured at higher rates than rival companies”, and “Tour Amazon’s dream home, where every appliance is also a spy”.
Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that "<exact quote>"
Is journalistically neutral. Amazon was asked about what we wrote. Here's what they said. You decide if you believe us, or Amazon.
I see nothing wrong with this, unless the headline of this story was "Goodreads' accelerated mission in delighting customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology.”
It went along the lines:
"The defence secretary said that we're fighting a righteous and humane war in Vietnam. The defense secretary is full of shit!"
Nowadays they send their spokes drones and have the spin masters cook up even more ridiculous shit.
Hunter S Thompson (RIP) must be spinning in his grave.
e: added quotes around Hunter's fictious statement
When the entire premise of the story is hyper-critical of Amazon, and Amazon's defense is half-hearted, vacuuous, and informationally background, you don't need advanced media literacy to think "Wow, that response from Amazon does NOT pass the bullshit sniff test, huh, I wonder what that means."
How much spoonfeeding do we expect to our readers?
This isn't "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him" <and we burned zero calories to validate that point>".
This isn't "99.9% of scientists think one thing. 0.1% think the opposite. But we're not going to tell you that, we'll just interview 1 scientist from each position and let you decide."
This is a super critical piece of Amazon that achieves the mandatory standards of reaching out to Amazon for comment, and the comment they got speaks for itself in contrast to the story so clearly that to editorialize on it any further insults the reader's intelligence.
The framing is what matters, and the WaPo story, the frame doesn't question whether or not Amazon's purchase was anti-competitive, just whether or not Amazon did a good job running it
No, they say “I saw that he had a weapon”, even if the reality is that some other cop said it.
> they say things like "officer-involved shooting"
That's not what the involved cops say, that’s what the department’s public affairs office says as a lead paragraph summary to discourage engagement with the details. (The details will then be whatever story the cops involved say.)
Publishing what was said is more "just the facts, please" than editorializing the response, as shitty PR-speak as it is.
ask any engineer there, this is basically true in the sense that amazon drastically professionalized what had been a deeply fly by night company. the way software was written and product cycles were done pre acquisition was hilariously bad.
the reason goodreads still looks so ancient today is that even a decade of amazon engineers trying to salvage it haven't been able to climb out from under the mountain of tech debt the company accrued pre acquisition.
amazon should have just scrapped and rebuilt the entire thing after the acquisition. or just not bought it and finished building their competitor to it that was in progress. either would have been more successful what they did.
Just write a script that excludes any articles which mentions that phrase for a better life.
That's been a pretty reliable indicator over the last decade.
I don't know. but I do know that the best marketers I've worked with all had one trait in common: they believed their own bullshit. One told me outright that the first thing he has to do when taking on a new account is to convince himself that the story he needs to tell is true because that stops him from having to lie.
Compare that to astroturfing. Bill Hick's opinion is very relevant for them especially.
"While I don't like that they do X, they are the best at Y, and they need to do X for your safety"
You get what you pay for.
With the kinds of salaries they make? Absolutely! I'll believe your butt makes chocolate ice cream for the kind of money those people make ^1.
^1 testing the theory on the other hand...not so much.