Dive Brief:

• Amazon spokesperson Jay Carney, formerly the press secretary for the Obama Administration, took to blog platform Medium Monday to refute an August article in the New York Times describing a rough work environment for the e-retailer’s white collar workers.

• Carney accused the Times of failing to divulge key details that would have undercut the paper’s description. “[H]ad the reporters checked their facts, the story they published would have been a lot less sensational, a lot more balanced, and, let’s be honest, a lot more boring,” Carney writes. “It might not have merited the front page, but it would have been closer to the truth.”

• But Times executive editor Dean Baquet published a response, also in Medium, defending the piece, writing: “[O]ur reporters spoke to more than a hundred current and former employees, at various levels and divisions, over many months. Many, including most of those you cited, talked about how they admired Amazon’s ambitions and urgency even as they described aspects of the workplace as troubling. Patterns emerged: many people raised similar concerns.”

Dive Insight:

These dueling posts two months after the New York Times published a scathing story about Amazon’s white-collar working conditions represent an unusually public spat.

One of Carney’s most forceful points was to reveal that a key Times source, Bo Olson, was essentially a disgruntled former employee who had been fired for misconduct. Olson had told the two Times reporters that worked on the story, Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” But Carney said that Olson had attempted to defraud vendors and falsified business records. “Did Ms. Kantor’s editors at The Times ask her whether Mr. Olson might have an axe to grind?” Carney asks in his post.

But Baquet said that the pattern Olson described was reiterated by other sources still at the company, as well as outside sources who deal with it, who presumably didn’t have similar reasons to speak to the paper about their complaints.

“Virtually every person quoted in the story stated a view that multiple other workers had also told us. (Some other workers were not quoted because of nondisclosure agreements, fear of retribution or because their current employers were doing business with Amazon.),” Banquet says. “In addition, we spoke to outsiders who interact with Amazon employees — recruiters, people at tech firms, employment lawyers — and heard their accounts.”

The spat follows an immediate response in August from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to employees just after the article was published, in which he asked for their direct feedback over their work situation.

The Times story “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day,” he said in a letter, in which he also encouraged employees to read the piece and to get in touch with the company, including him directly, with any issues that would bolster the article’s claims. 

The Monday posts only seem to continue the tit-for-tat, which doesn’t seem to be abating.

Amazon has dealt with similar criticism in the past. Brad Stone, author of the 2013 book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," (which famously earned a one-star review on Amazon itself from Bezos' wife), found many of the same issues. And warehouse workers have written high-profile depictions of pretty harsh conditions among blue-collar jobs there as well.

Those descriptions interfere with Amazon’s reputation as an innovative tech and retail company, and, though it remains to be seen how much consumers care, that could be a major negative in a highly competitive retail environment.