Two months ago, The New York Times ran a bruising expose on Amazon’s workplace, with this memorable quote:

Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Amazon protested, but the Times stuck by their story. Time passed.

On Monday, Jay Carney, Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon, wrote a direct response to that expose in Medium, called What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You.

With those two pieces as background, go read this brilliant analysis by Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. There’s too much in Ben’s piece to summarize in a few words, but here’s just a taste:

The importance of Amazon’s response is obvious: unlike days of old, when corporations or individuals in the news had to resort to letters to the editor (which may or may not have been printed) and angry calls to the editor-in-chief, Amazon can go straight to the public with their complaints; it may sound cliché to say that “everyone is a publisher” but for the fact it’s true. Moreover, like anything else on the Internet, Amazon’s response was immediately available to everyone in the world: we take that for granted today, but compared to not that long ago when distribution required printing presses and delivery trucks this is truly an astounding development.

Terrific, insightful writing.