In the case of WaPo’s coverage, there exists one growing controversy that has remained conspicuously uncovered: the conditions of Amazon’s workplace.
Such conditions have been covered extensively in the mainstream press. A number of Amazon’s warehouse workforce has long complained about abusive conditions, with one reporter who went undercover as a warehouse worker for six months comparing it to a stint in prison.
“I’ve worked in warehouses before, but this was nothing like I had experienced. You don’t have proper breaks — by the time you get to the canteen, you only have 15 or 20 minutes for lunch, in a 10-1/2-hour working day. You don’t have time to eat properly to get a drink,” the writer, James Bloodworth, told Business Insider.
Normally, such an omission of horror stories would not necessarily raise eyebrows. After all, Amazon might be one of the largest companies in the world, but the paper has routinely covered other various topics related to the e-commerce giant, like its acquisition of Whole Foods, or Seattle’s tax environment.
Except Amazon and WaPo have a special relationship: namely the fact that they both fall under the ultimate purview of billionaire Jeff Bezos.
And it’s not like the coverage of Amazon’s work conditions have gone unnoticed by national newspapers. WaPo’s largest competitor, The New York Times, printed an article in 2015 describing Amazon as a “bruising workplace.”
This post never made it into the pages of Bezos’s own paper — which he purchased two years earlier, according to a search by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The easiest explanation for why WaPo employees have refrained from scrutinizing its owner is that they don’t want to rock the boat. After all, media jobs are hard to come by, and it is easy to see Bezos’s ownership as a rock of stability.
More than 400 WaPo employees signed a letter to Bezos demanding higher wages and benefits on June 11. – READ MORE
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