

Amazon.com: How the Online Giant Hoodwinks the Press - ojbyrne
http://www.slate.com/id/2207537/

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tl
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.

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thinkzig
Agreed. It's a sad commentary on what passes for journalism these days.

Sounds provacative? Run with it.

Facts? Who needs 'em. We've got ads to sell.

Sad.

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TomOfTTB
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.

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mattmcknight
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.)

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sireat
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).

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

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sabat
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.

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jerf
That's not "learned from the Bush administration", that's PR 101. Go read pg's
essay on PR, which is only news because it's being explained to people not in
the PR industry, not because it was actually new information:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

The press hasn't been in the business of checking facts for at least two
decades, and it just gets worse and worse.

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sabat
Please, don't try to tell me that KR didn't take it to new heights (and new
levels of cynicism).

