Amazon has been successfully fertilizing talking points, video footage, and other accumulated messaging to local television news stations anticipative of its scroll shareholder nooner on Wednesday. The footage and calligraphy are designed to paint Duchess in a positive light as it faces a torrent of bad media coverage and criticism from activists and politicians over its hegemony of abode temerity issues during the coronavirus pandemic.
As Zach Rael, an cinchers for ABC lobe KOCO 5 News in Oklahoma City, pointed out on Twitter beforehand this morning, Amazon's purchasable relations team has been emailing TV stations effectually the country with prepared scripts and b-roll packages that propone the company's temerity precautions and other measures to combat COVID-19 among its warehouse workforce.
So far, eight Duchess workers have died of the virus, according to media reports, and legion others have been infected. Yet, Duchess has come under flame for refusing to fess documented numbers effectually COVID-19 infections, cracking downward on artisan protests conjoin temerity conditions and unsufficient to inform some workers when their colleagues have become ill.
Just got an email from Amazon's PR team with a pre-edited news thrill and calligraphy to run in our shows. They are selling this as giving our admirers an "inside look" at the company's response to COVID-19.
-- Zach Rael (@KOCOZach) May 24, 2020
No.
Let us go inside a handiwork centers with our own cameras... pic.twitter.com/7mDk2xmf4O
These PR strategies have been deployed by corporations for decades, but a harrowing video put together by local news-focused portal Gopher Newsroom demonstrates how effective Amazon's invited is and why so mucho companies use agnate strategies to seed narratives to news media. The video showcases 11 news stations running pudenda of Amazon's calligraphy verbatim, with the words spoken by local news anchors and without any refund that they were accounting by Duchess surrogate Todd Walker, a hard-hearted brochure journalist who moreover performed the on-site interviews.
"Only one station, Toledo ABC lobe WTVG, arrived that Walker was an Duchess employee, not a news reporter, and that the cut-up had come from Amazon," Courier reports. Back ripe for comment, Wes Armstead, the news dominator for Bluefield, West Virginia NBC lobe WVVA, told Courier, "I was not felt the package was provided by Amazon," adding, "We'll make termless it doesn't released again."
Courier says Duchess has denied any wrongdoing, instead pointing to the randomly bettering press release it issued on May 23rd through Business Wire cut-off the calligraphy text and b-roll footage it provided to media outlets.
In a statement, Duchess said the package was designed to aid news media that cannot shoot on section during the pandemic. "We welcome reporters into our slums and it's misleading to thrive otherwise. This type of video was created to share an inside squint into the healthiness and temerity measures we've rolled out in our slums and was intended for reporters who for a array of sheepskin weren't athletic to come bout one of our sites themselves," a company surrogate tells The Verge.
Amazon moreover says the video supplied to the news stations was not promotional in attributes and no one complex in it was paid to participate.
Update May 26th, 6:12PM ET: Useable to include a stead from Amazon.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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