Amazon is taking proactive action ahead of Wednesday's annual shareholders meeting -- at which investors plan on demanding the company address worker safety issues after at least eight warehouse employees have died of COVID-19 -- by pushing a package to local news outlets that promotes the corporation's health and safety efforts.
While most TV news professionals have scoffed at the idea of running Amazon-provided content as news, at least 11 stations across the country ran some form of the package on their news broadcasts. The package -- you can view the script Amazon provided to news stations here -- was produced by Amazon spokesperson Todd Walker.
Only one station, Toledo ABC affiliate WTVG, acknowledged that Walker was an Amazon employee, not a news reporter, and that the content had come from Amazon.
Amazon compromises local news ahead of their shareholders meeting.
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, grim meathook future, mpegs, plague
6 Responses:
The comparisons to Sinclair-owned news outlets is so obvious that it's almost as if Amazon just flat-out plagiarised them.
And it's trippy how I read this blog post almost immediately after I read this piece about Vince McMahon actually insisting that he's "not the bad guy" for his blatantly illegal business practises (the latest ones, I mean).
Woe unto those poor oligarchs. They just want to roll around in their billions, but those mean ol' below-the-line employees keep harassing them with all their "We want to be treated like human beings!" talk.
Why do they do it? They must have known it would get out?
Anyhow, how is it so hard to say that they messed up on something or the other? People accept apologies if you stop the behaviour...
Every day and in every way, I grow more and more cynical.
Corporations never, ever apologize. Their lawyers tell them that that could be construed as an admission of guilt. So at best they fauxpologize, like the abuser in every toxic relationship ever: "We're sorry you were offended, or misinterpreted our best intentions".
Was there ever a time when people with power were decent? I know in my country when we fought for independence, there were a lot of gems. Flawed gems to be sure(when I was a kid, I really believed all my role models were flawless) but never for personal gain.
Weird how it deteriorates so quickly...
It shouldn't be normal to feel this old in my twenties
There really isn't all that much difference between leaders of the past and leaders of today, save for the fact that they now have more dangerous weapons, but the citizenship have more advanced ways sharing info (and vice versa). That means that legends built up around the "great" leaders of the past can be better dismantled. That's not really cynicism so much as maturity.
There's an author/journalist named Robert Caro who's spent his career reporting the lives of powerful men and the horrible things they do with that power. His multi-volume book series on LBJ has actually been lauded on both sides of the aisle. The most recent volume of that series came out in 2012. During a promo tour, he did an interview with The Guardian in which he said the following (bold emphasis mine):
The point is, longing for a time "when people were decent" is to long for something that never existed. That's something that unites Trump with left-leaning misogynists like Aaron Sorkin (who wrote this MAGA-esque piece of shit) and Bill Maher: they long for a time when (White) men were in charge and no one was able to call them out on it. The duty of the people is to keep them in check.
As Robert Reich famously said: