Amazon.com

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What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

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What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

There was a time, long ago, when it was easy to pinpoint the beginning and end of the "Christmas season."

In cultures linked to centuries of Christian tradition, the feast of Christmas -- the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ or Christ Mass -- was on December 25, the start of a festive 12-day season that ended with the Feast of the Epiphany. Many Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the ancient Julian calendar, celebrating Christmas on January 7.

Then there is the "Christmas season" for the whole culture. One big change occurred on December 26, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- focusing on Christmas shopping -- signed a joint resolution of Congress defining Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. That established an official starting line for the dash to Christmas.

By the early 1960s, the name "Black Friday" was attached to the day after Thanksgiving, with armies of shoppers heading to downtown stores and, eventually, the shopping malls that replaced them. This brand of Christmas opened with a bang, with throngs gathering before dawn to grab "Black Friday" bargains, with police present to control the inevitable pushing and shoving.

Then came the Internet, with more changes in the size and shape of the commercial steamroller known as the "Holidays."

"It's safe to say that Black Friday has become a concept, not an event. We have ended up with Black Fridays all the way down" the calendar during November, said Jeremy Lott, managing editor for publications at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former editor of the Real Clear Religion website.

"Basically, we're talking about Black Friday after Black Friday everywhere, world without end. Amen," he added, in a telephone interview.


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New podcast: New York Times lets Planned Parenthood spin bad news about Margaret Sanger?

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Soon after the founding of Amazon.com in 1995, I began offering the following research tip to my journalism students.

When reporting about a person or a topic, especially when the subject is controversial, go to Amazon.com and type in two or perhaps three search terms — including a proper name or the keyword linked to the topic you are researching.

Of course, reporters should do broader searches online and in professional-level periodical collections — looking for experts and activists on both sides of the story being covered. What an Amazon.com search gives you is a look at who has been doing, well, book-length studies of a person or a topic.

So let’s take a look at an Amazon.com search linked to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). Let’s search for “Margaret Sanger” and “eugenics.” We are looking for sources that could have been used in the New York Times piece that ran the other day with this sobering double-decker headline:

Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding

That’s a very controversial topic and this Times piece, we shall see, includes some rather blunt information about this “icon” of the cultural left.

What the story does not contain, however, is a single quote from a scholar or activist who has done years of research to gather information critical of Sanger and her legacy in American life and culture.

Right at the top of that Amazon.com search are books by two experts who, to my eyes, look solid.

One book is entitled “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.” The author is not a scribe at a right-wing think tank. Instead, Edwin Black — on his Amazon.com biography page — is described as:

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 200 bestselling editions in 20 languages in more than 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel.


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The Atlantic profiles Jeff Bezos's 'master plan' with nary a hint as to moral and spiritual sides

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Recently, the Atlantic published a cover story on Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, with a worth anywhere between $112 billion to $137 billion (it varies). The gist wasn’t so much Bezos’ money but how his use of it has made him the most powerful man in American culture.

The scary part isn’t so much the money part but how Bezos’ Amazon.com controls so much. Although the reporter wanted to know what makes the 55-year-old behind it all tick, he didn’t talk about Bezos’ spiritual-moral-ethical side at all or whether he even has one.

In the past, Bezos has sold himself as a values kind of guy, enjoying breakfasts with his family, doing the dishes every night and never scheduling work sessions before 10 a.m. according to this 2018 Wall Street Journal report that was based on a YouTube video (see above). At the time that story ran, Bezos’ extramarital affair was in full flower and one wonders if the tech exec was simply lying when he spoke about his supposedly serene domestic life.

Back to the Atlantic piece:

Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry — institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers.

Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture. …

Since that time, Bezos’s reach has only grown. To the U.S. president, he is a nemesis. To many Americans, he is a beneficent wizard of convenience and abundance.

The story then sketches out a Brave New Worldesque kind of control that the Amazon founder will soon have over us all in an era when it and Google, Facebook and Apple have become the new robber barons of our age, monopolizing vast portions of the American economy.


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Playing 'Think like a Godbeat pro': Let's look for religion hooks in big Amazon.com search

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One of the big themes through our years of work here at GetReligion is that reporters with experience and training on the religion beat do a better job of handling stories with strong religious themes than reporters with zero experience on this complicated beat.

I know, I know. #DUH

So why, I am asked all the time, do the editors that staff major newsrooms (a) fail to see the big religion hooks (we call them "ghosts" here at GetReligion) in so many stories and (b) fail to include religion-beat professionals in the teams covering these stories? Obviously, those two questions are connected. It's a big journalism mystery.

With all of that in mind, let's look at a major national story and then play a little news-coverage game. Let's call it, "Think like a Godbeat pro." In this case, we are talking about the much-ballyhooed process to select a home for a massive new Amazon.com headquarters, with thousands of jobs attached.

This story is everywhere, as you would expect, since the 20 "finalist" cities are spread across much of the map of North America. To save time and space, let's look at a new report on this topic by the team at Axios, with this punchy headline, "Jeff Bezos’s brilliant PR stunt." Here is the overture:

Elected officials across the country have spent the past three months falling all over themselves to show Amazon just how much their cities love the e-commerce giant and would do just about anything to house its new headquarters.

Bottom line: The real winner is Amazon, which has created a feedback loop of positive press and fawning politicians just as the company increasingly needs both.

Big picture: Amazon, the world’s largest Internet company by revenue and the fourth-largest company by market cap, is reshaping everything from industries to main streets to homes. But this omnipotence also has put Amazon in the bullseye of a burgeoning "tech-lash," alongside gilded peers like Facebook, Google and Apple.

Now, that "tech-lash" angle is interesting and it involves all kinds of issues, from the brutal side effects of economic libertarianism (must-read book here) to religious, moral and cultural battles linked to gender and sexuality.

Now, let's keep reading. This brings us to the religion hook for this little journalism game.


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