• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, October 22, 2015

By now you have read lots of coverage of Monday's battle on Medium, where Amazon spokesman Jay Carney, a former journalist — and at times, a spokesman for both President Obama and Vice President Biden — leveled various criticisms at The New York Times for its lengthy story on Amazon that essentially detailed what a terrible place it is to work. Then there was Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet's response that defended the story's accuracy.

Unfortunately, instead of pointing to factual errors in the story, Carney relied on the age-old tactic of trying to discredit a small group of Amazon individuals quoted in the story, opening the door to Baquet to reveal that their quotes were echoed by dozens of others not quoted directly. Carney has been around long enough to know that you can fight the press on factual mistakes, but they will rarely if ever budge on the tone or nuance of an overall story. Plus he is now wearing the mantle of PR Guy, not White House Spokesman, which makes a profound difference in how he is heard.

In fact, there is no better example of asymmetrical warfare than a PR department taking on a major national news organization like the Times — regardless of how well-known and/or credentialed the top PR person might be. While there are Hollywood and Washington publicists infamous for running roughshod over the press because they have total control over access to certain stars or government information, more often PR departments (or individuals) are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to trying to "fix" a perceived wrong.

First and perhaps foremost is the inherent power of the press. They essentially set the agenda of what most people know of world, national and local events. With the Internet at your fingertips, this should no longer be true, but because a frightening number of Americans get their news only from one of the three major TV networks — or worse yet, Facebook — they still fish from a very small pond of perspectives driven primarily by a few major international news operations.

Although direct postings and smartphone video are somewhat changing the game, the mainstream press still has the resources and will to decide if an event will become newsworthy. Amazon is a perfect example. Who really cares what work life is like there? Only the employees (who are free to leave if they don't like it) and the Times.

In spite of black eyes like Judy Miller's stories on Iraq, Jeff Gerth's stories on Whitewater, Fox Butterfield's stories on William Kennedy Smith’s victim and Michael Finkel's story on the African slave trade — not to mention various periodic plagiarists like Jayson Blair — most people tend to trust what they read in the Times. "I read it in The New York Times" is frequently a source of "validation" in arguments. So anyone like Carney who tries to take them on is already fighting from a massive disadvantage — especially since PR professionals by nature are thought to have ONLY their client's best interests at heart, regardless of the facts.

While there are certainly some fair-minded folks working in every news organization, there still tends to be a pervasive arrogance that helps convince journalists that their POV is the MOST — if not only — valid POV. I recall sitting in a presentation where a small-business man tried to air a perfectly legitimate gripe about the Washington Post's coverage. The late Ben Bradlee not only didn’t address the man’s specific concern, the Post executive editor slammed the poor man, retorting angrily, "You just don't understand how the press works."

That’s a widely held attitude in newsrooms: that "we are smarter, more educated, more informed than our readers, and work in a business that is so complex that the little man will never get it the way we do." This is why trying to take on the press over the nuance of their stories is a fool's errand.

With the growth of social media and the occasional in-house ombudsman, or public editor (who, BTW, also took issue with the Times’ own Amazon story) readers have avenues to try and redress what they perceive as errors in judgment by the press. But the farther you go up the news pyramid, into the rarified air breathed by a New York Times, know that you are fighting a know-it-all attitude with a first reaction that is always defensive.  

But, hey, it makes for an entertaining few days for the rest of us.