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Amazon Misplaying Its Stated Mission

Kevin Kelleher

It must be starting to feel very lonely over there at Amazon.com .

First, the company irks investors by warning that profit margins may decline for the fourth straight year. Now it may alienate millions of customers by taking on the Humane Society of the U.S., which on Thursday filed a legal complaint against Amazon for selling animal-fighting magazines that the group says are illegal.

Although the issue of animal fights arouses strong opinions, a financial story isn't the best place to air them. Likewise for the debate over whether and where to place limits on free speech. So let's focus instead on how Amazon is handling this controversy, and what it means for shareholders of the company.

And how is Amazon faring? So far, not terribly well.

Remember, this is the Amazon that brushed off calls from investors for better earnings because, it says, it puts the customer first. But when customers called Amazon about the animal-fighting materials, it was their turn to get the brushoff.

On Thursday, so many people bombarded Amazon's main number with calls that it added a special message for them in which a smug, anodyne voice offered a terse lecture on free-speech rights before directing them to the company Web site to email complaints or post comments.

Amazon likes to talk about the importance of customer relationships, so it was surprising it didn't even allow callers to leave a voice message. On such a heated topic, people want to feel their views are heard. When they don't, they get really upset. Amazon could have defused a lot of anger simply by listening better.

What's more, Amazon has taken on a formidable foe. It was lucky for Amazon that the Humane Society stopped short of calling for a boycott. It boasts 10 million members; just how many of them shop at Amazon is hard to gauge, but it must be in the low millions. Even a tiny fraction canceling their Amazon accounts could wreak financial damage.

Michael Markarian, an executive vice president at the Humane Society, said the focus is on magazines such as Feathered Warrior and Gamecock that run advertisements for dogs and birds bred for fighting, knives designed to be attached to their legs, and fighting events in states where ads for such events are a felony. Amazon is the only retail vendor for those magazines, according to the complaint.

Markarian says the ads violate federal law. Other magazines, such as Grit and Steel, discuss cockfighting without those ads, and the Humane Society isn't asking Amazon to stop selling them.

Amazon has stopped selling other publications deemed unlawful, such as Mein Kampf in Germany. Asked for Amazon's views on the magazines' legality, spokeswoman Patty Smith directed me to a statement Thursday from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

That statement said that the section of the federal law "cited by the Humane Society has been applied only to those who are actually engaged in animal fighting. It has never been used to prosecute advertisers or publishers, much less distributors." So, Amazon's stance could be vindicated, although it would make for a nasty black eye if the courts deem the magazines illegal.

Amazon did pull down a DVD last year that showed, according to the complaint, 20 dogs engaged in fights featuring graphic footage. The Humane Society says those DVDs are illegal, but Smith says Amazon took them down on two occasions because they were distasteful, not for legal reasons.

Smith pointed, with just a tad more pride than was necessary, to books on Amazon that describe illegal activities but that are not themselves illegal: home-grown drugs, do-it-yourself bombs and suicide how-tos. "There are books out there like Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, or Final Exit by the Hemlock Society," Smith says. "Absolutely, we sell them."

There is something a little too blithe about how easily Amazon reaches for the free-speech card. As a safe harbor, free speech is precious but devilishly complex. Whenever it comes before the Supreme Court, it's always fraught with a good deal of agonizing, complexity, slippery slopes and dangerous precedents. There's nothing cut-and-dried or cavalier about it.

So Amazon's free-speech proclamations would ring louder if it weren't also making a profit from the works it considers distasteful. Every subscription of Feathered Warrior, every copy of the reviled Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, gives Amazon money that ends up in the pockets of employees, executives and ultimately shareholders. Just how comfortable each one is in sharing what others call "blood money" is up to each individual.

I asked Smith whether Amazon would consider donating to charities any profit from its most controversial publications -- a negligible amount of its annual revenue, yet a priceless gesture, one that could fend off boycotts and underscore that its free-speech defense is more than rhetoric.

She grew indignant: "So you should only profit from popular speech?" she scoffed, before offering me a terse lecture on free speech. "I find it absolutely astonishing that as a journalist you'd talk about the rhetoric of free speech."

Point taken. Next time I'll bite my tongue.