Amazon asked The New York Times to correct its unflattering exposé of their workplace. They didn't, so Amazon just published it themselves.

Amazon&#039;s European headquarters in Luxembourg

(Image credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)

published 19 October 2015

No company would be thrilled to be portrayed as the worst corporate workplace in the world, but thanks to a blistering critique of Amazon in The New York Times in August, the massive Seattle-based online retailer more or less won that ignominious blue ribbon. One memorable part of the piece, for example, quoted a books marketing employee, Bo Olson, confessing, "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk."

Amazon Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs Jay Carney (yes, the former journalist and ex-White House press secretary) wasn't having any of that. In a piece published Monday morning, Carney slammed The New York Times for poor reporting, and appeared to discredit a number of testimonies used as proof of Amazon's allegedly nightmarish workplace. That books marketer who claimed he saw everyone crying at his or her desks? Carney outs Olson as possibly having "an axe to grind": "[Olson's] brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted it and resigned immediately." Carney continues:

There are [other examples]. In any story, there are matters of opinion and there are issues of fact. And context is critical. Journalism 101 instructs that facts should be checked and sources should be vetted. When there are two sides of a story, a reader deserves to know them both. Why did the Times choose not to follow standard practice here? We don't know. [Medium]

Carney further states that Jodi Kantor, one of the journalists who spent six months putting the piece together, never verified negative comments with Amazon, nor asked them for a comment on the quotes. "When the story came out, we knew it misrepresented Amazon. Once we could look into the most sensational anecdotes, we realized why. We presented the Times with our findings several weeks ago, hoping they might take action to correct the record. They haven't, which is why we decided to write about it ourselves," Carney said.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.