Amazon.com: How the Online Giant Hoodwinks the Press

I don't see any hoodwinking going on here. I do see a vapid piece about the same press that generally fails on fact-checking and not being a PR mouthpiece doing what they normally do.

I’m going to defend this article. I do think the headline has too much hyperbole but the point he makes is a good one: Amazon’s PR department made a claim and papers just ran with that claim sight unseen.

What makes this a bigger issue than simple fact checking is that the claim is coming from Amazon’s PR department which has every reason to exaggerate and the claim is unverifiable by the media. So while a normal fact checking error involves the press not checking out what they believe to be true this situation involves the press publishing something that is very likely false and which we know they couldn’t check.

So while it seems like an attack on Amazon (which would be out of line since their PR is just doing what they’re supposed to) it’s really an attack on sloppy journalism.

This article is ridiculous. No one is hoodwinking anyone. Amazon is choosing what to report on very carefully here. They don't want to actually pre-announce Q4 financials. In any case, from a technical and operations perspective it is very interesting to know what capacity they are capable of. (Especially given the number of e-commerce sites that had significant downtime this year.)

In related news, suit is back this year...

Amazon's PR here is not particularly insidious, what you see/read in Mass Media is PR roughly 80 percent of the time (some MM such as The Economist excepted).

This is by I think we need to be careful when we're studying success. Much of what people claim is PR.

Amazon PR learned a lot from the Bush administration (K.R.) about how to fool them. State things as though they're established facts. Typical lazy editors won't insist that the facts are checked.