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>So what happened? · I mean, how is it that The Times portrays a hell on earth, a culture that would drive me to quitting in about fifteen minutes? There
by jasode 11y ago
>So what happened? · I mean, how is it that The Times portrays a hell on earth, a culture that would drive me to quitting in about fifteen minutes?
There's a reason for the disconnect for some of the employees who don't see "hell on earth".
If you do meta-analysis of the mainstream media's coverage of Amazon, a few patterns emerge:
-- The NYT almost always has a negative bias about Amazon. Even before yesterday's article about Amazon being a "bruising workplace", they ran numerous articles about Amazon and book publishers renegotiating their contracts and the stories were always biased towards the publishers.
-- articles from Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review are not as negative. Unfortunately, they have smaller circulation numbers, and their articles are more heavily blocked behind paywalls. Their articles are not as widely accessible and therefore not as easy to share. As far as "dictating the narrative" and "shaping public perception" about Amazon employees, NYT drowns out WSJ & HBR.
-- the readership for NYT (more workers) is different from WSJ & HBR (more managers). Therefore, articles about sweatshop pressure at warehouses and white-collar burnout in the corporate offices will resonate with NYT readers. Even if the senior editors at NYT privately don't favor bashing Amazon repeatedly, one can't blame them for always running the stories because they know what their readers like. In the comments section, NYT readers continue the pile on of scorn. It's the same situation with NYT running negative articles about Marissa Mayer at Yahoo and her "unfair" personal baby daycare, eliminating remote workers, etc.
The negative effects at Amazon mentioned by NYT can be true while simultaneously, employees like Tim Bray don't experience it. However, NYT is not interested in running a story that interviews a bunch of "Tim Brays".