Margaret Sullivan, NYT Public Editor: "Publishing battle should be covered, not joined."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/pu...ined.html?_r=0
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But it’s certainly true that the literary establishment has received a great deal of sympathetic coverage. Authors including Douglas Preston and Philip Roth have been featured giving their allegiance to the complaint against Amazon. But Amazon itself (as well as writers who say legacy publishers have ignored their work while Amazon has made reaching readers possible) is represented less consistently and forcefully. It doesn’t help that Amazon generally doesn’t comment on controversies of this kind. (One worthy exception was Mr. Streitfeld’s July 13 article in the Sunday Business section.)
It’s easier to find Amazon defenders and fans outside the pages of The Times. The tech writer Mathew Ingram, for example, writes that though the conventional wisdom says that Amazon is “an aggressive and possibly illegal monopoly aimed at killing publishers, and that its behavior is also bad for authors and probably consumers as well,” the opposite is true.
“Amazon’s entrance into the book publishing and distribution market,” he says, “has been nothing but good for consumers — because it has meant both lower prices and more choice — and arguably for many authors as well.”
In some Times stories, the Amazon position is summarized in a few sentences, and then it’s back to the opposition’s fears and anger.
Consider an article last week on the business section front headlined “Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-Book Tactics.” Quoting the powerful agent Andrew Wylie as predicting the death of literary culture, it reported that many authors — not all of whom are published by Hachette — want the Justice Department to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics. But it’s not until near the end that doubt is sown: “Whether a viable case could be mounted against Amazon is a matter of debate among antitrust scholars. An earlier effort by Hachette to interest government regulators in a case did not go anywhere.”
In that story, the author Ursula K. Le Guin offered more on the perils of Amazon. “We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author.”
But Barry Eisler — who writes best-selling thrillers and left traditional publishing for a lucrative deal with Amazon — points out that removing pre-order buttons and slowing shipping hardly amounts to “disappearing” or censorship. On the contrary, he says, Amazon’s self-publishing platform helps many authors who otherwise might never find an audience.
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MY take: It’s important to remember that this is a tale of digital disruption, not good and evil. The establishment figures The Times has quoted on this issue, respected and renowned though they are, should have their statements subjected to critical analysis, just as Amazon’s actions should be. The Times has given a lot of ink to one side and — in story choice, tone and display — helped to portray the retailer as a literature-killing bully instead of a hard-nosed business.
I would like to see more unemotional exploration of the economic issues; more critical questioning of the statements of big-name publishing players; and greater representation of those who think Amazon may be a boon to a book-loving culture, not its killer.
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I assume the pushback on BOGO Streifield got too strong to ignore.
I still expect the NYT's gold-plated campaign to continue. Those $100k full page ads need servicing, after all.