Washington Post rekindles Amazon’s row with New York Times

Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple could be playing with fire as he backed the New York Times in its row with Jeff Bezos’s, pictured, Amazon – Bezos also owns the Post. Photograph: Ted S. Warren/AP

A sign of editorial independence at the Washington Post? The breaker of Watergate waded into the row between its rival the New York Times and online retailer Amazon with a piece which backed the venerable newspaper group on Monday.

That’s the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

Headlined Amazon’s weak attack on the New York Times, media critic Erik Wemple analysed this week’s row over a hard-hitting piece about working practices at the online retailer published in August.

Writing about the Medium piece by Jay Carney, one-time White House aide turned corporate affairs chieftain at Amazon, Wemple said parts of the delayed fightback “shores up the depiction in the newspaper of a no-holds-barred work environment”. The piece ended “great work, Kantor”, referring to the lead reporter on the investigation, Jodi Kantor.

After paying $250m (£161.5m) for the Post in 2013, Bezos vowed to continue the paper’s long history of independent journalism. Let’s hope he meant it, for Wemple’s sake.