Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times, responded on Monday to Amazon’s assertion that the newspaper mischaracterized the company in its August profile of the retail giant.

Jay Carney, Amazon senior vice president for global corporate affairs, took issue with perhaps the most enduring quote from the article about Amazon’s bruising work culture.

He concluded: “What we do know is, had the reporters checked their facts, the story they published would have been a lot less sensational, a lot more balanced, and, let’s be honest, a lot more boring”.

Carney also published an email from Jodi Kantor, one of the reporters who worked on the story, where she told a company executive that the paper was not working on a story comprised entirely of a “stack of negative anecdotes from ex-Amazonians”.

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos blasted the article in an internal memo sent to employees shortly after it was published.

For example, the NYT story quoted former Amazon employee Bo Olson as saying “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk”.

Carney slams the Times for not mentioning that Bo Olson, one of the sources referenced in its story, left the company “after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and hide it by falsifying business records”.

We have asked for comment from The New York Times. “They haven’t, which is why we chose to write about it ourselves”. He says that Amazon raised the issues described in today’s post “several weeks ago”, going public with them after not getting a correction.

The piece’s authors have said they based their reporting on interviews with over 100 current and former Amazon employees.

And finally, Carney points to another former employee who posted a response to the article in which she says she wasn’t forced to work long hours - she did so by choice.

A few Amazon employees had already hit back at the Times report soon after its release.

He’s got one important nugget but the rest of his piece reads like a weak response from a bully that’s been called out. I’ve often reached out to the company for comment on a story only to be told that the company doesn’t have anything to say on the matter. It might not have merited the front page, but it would have been closer to the truth.

“When the story came out, we knew it misrepresented Amazon“. The information for the most part, though, did not contradict what the former employees said in our story; instead, you mostly asserted that there were no records of what the workers were describing. As I said, this article is more of an inquiry into the nature of work, which is why we’re trying to get you to share your point of view as well as positive material - to get anecdotes and quotes from you into the story that says “here’s why we do things this way, here’s what we’ve learned, here’s what works for us”.

The implicit claim here is that Bo Olson fabricated the scene of constantly crying Amazon employees as a form of revenge, that he’s nothing more than disgruntled, a liar to the end-but Carney doesn’t say that because public relations requires both malice and cowardice. A third, Julia Cheiffetz, wrote in Medium, about being sidelined after having a child and being diagnosed with cancer.