Categories: OLD Media Moves

The Amazon.com media spin

TheStreet.com media critic Marek Fuchs writes Thursday that Amazon.com aims to get the business media to play along with its game by issuing a press release stating that its online sales this Christmas season were the highest ever.

Fuchs wrote, “In this holiday season, of course, online retail is growing at approximately a 20% clip, so having the best season ever on a sales basis is close to meaningless. Unless Amazon was talking about profits and … uh, it wasn’t.

“But look at how well Amazon plays the game, which is to say how well it orchestrates the game. In an industry (retail) that is struggling and earning a lot of appropriately negative headlines, Amazon’s mix of preening over how many individual items it sold and insertion of interesting facts about these items carries the day.

“This mix serves as good as dictation for the business media, which is willing to completely ignore how false a mark of accomplishment like a sales record is in a field like online retailing, which is growing by leaps and bounds, without any mention of a bottom line, the only thing that matters to investors.”

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.