Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Two months after The New York Times‘ devastating takedown of Amazon’s culture, Amazon fired back. Where’s the whole truth here?

Where’s the whole truth here? There is none. Because by definition, stories always leave out more than they include.

As briefly as possible, here’s what happened. On August 15, the Times wrote about Amazon’s “bruising workplace.” Jeff Bezos emailed his employees a non-denial denial of the story. Two months passed. Amazon PR head (and former Obama press secretary) Jay Carney ripped the article in a post on Medium. The executive editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, responded. Carney rebutted. Finally — well, finally is a word I can’t really use here, but anyway, two other Times  reporters published a story about the fight.

As I attempted to retrieve the truth from this food fight, this is what became clear. There is none. Because by definition, stories always leave out more than they include.

Here’s another one for the bulging “Kids Are Dumb” file: it seems a Florida teenager has cost her father an $80,000 legal settlement with a single, profoundly ill-advised Facebook post.
 
Patrick Snay, 69, had served as headmaster at a Miami private school called Gulliver Preparatory School until 2010, when his contract wasn’t renewed. Snay sued Gulliver for age discrimination, and in November 2011, the school settled out of court with an agreement to pay Snay $80,000 in damages, $10,000 in back pay, and $60,000 in legal fees. As is often the case, one of the conditions of the settlement was confidentiality, with Snay and his wife promising not to tell anyone about the existence or terms of the deal.
 
However Snay did tell his daughter Dana, a former student at the school, who now boasted to her 1,200 closest friends on Facebook: “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Gulliver alumni saw the posts and alerted the school’s lawyers, who promptly informed Snay senior the deal was off. He had obviously violated the confidentiality clause....

It’s no surprise that interesting and unusual claims are often the most widely circulated articles on social media. Who wants to share boring stuff?

The problem, however, is that the spread of rumors, misinformation and unverified claims can overwhelm any effort to set the record straight, as we’ve seen during controversies over events like the Boston Marathon bombings and the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration manipulated unemployment statistics.

Everyone knows there is dubious information online, of course, but estimating the magnitude of the problem has been difficult until now....