[Peace-discuss] Re: Denigrating Carter's Book

[John W.]

At 09:35 AM 1/15/2007, David Green wrote:

>This should clarify John Wason's concern: there are already positive 
>customer reviews, but the "headline" review selected is the Goldberg drive-by.
>
>DG

Looks to me like Amazon.com has changed it.  I just did the search, 
precisely as the author below suggests.  I got simply the list of Jimmy 
Carter's books, with "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" at the top of the 
list.  When I checked out the 415 customer reviews, all of the reviews on 
the first page were positive.

So perhaps Amazon IS responsive to customer feedback, and the outrage 
expressed worked as it should?

I still can't explain why their initial inclination would have been to 
denigrate Carter's book, however.

John Wason



>[Excerpt from Qumsiyeh's [HumanRights] Amazon.com, wheels of justice,
>and "Little Mosque on the Prairie" ; 1/14/07]
>
>Follow-up to earlier action alert about Amazon's poor treatment of
>Carter's book: Thanks to the hundreds of you who wrote and those who
>copied me on the letters to Amazon. Other recipients of my email said
>they could not find the negative Washington Post/Goldberg review
>displayed prominently in the front. But you can go to Amazon.com and
>search Jimmy Carter and it will take you to its page. There you would
>actually have to scroll through it to get to customer reviews which I
>agree were good. Other readers said that Amazon has allowed good
>customer reviews and so it is OK if they included Goldberg's malicious
>review. But this is simply not how Amazon treats other books. In fact
>to my knowledge there is simply no book in Amazon's top 100 sellers
>that is treated like Carter's (with a negative long review before
>customer reviews). Take for example Thomas Friedman's stupid book in
>defense of corporate globalization "The World is Flat" and see how it
>is displayed with no negative editorial reviews. In fact, Amazon sells
>Hitler's Mein Kempf, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other
>books like that without treating them in as shabby a way they treated
>Carter's book (ie. no lengthy 1600 word negative reviews in the section
>for editorial reviews)! BTW, the reviewer (Goldberg) was a guard at the
>infamous Ketziot prison (in this video about political prisoners in
>Israeli jails their is quite a chilling anecdote about Ketziot:
>"Captured Prisoners,"
><http://www.ifamericansknew.org/ 
>stats/cap-pris.html>http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/cap-pris.html). 
>Anyway I know I
>will buy my future books at local booksellers and when I have to do it
>over the internet, I will use the unionized bookstore Powells. If you
>enter through the union portal, a percent supports the union there:
><http://www.unionplus.org/benefits/education/frame_powells.cfm>http://www.unionplus.org/benefits/education/frame_powells.cfm
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