This month, the CEO of trendy luggage unicorn Away, Steph Korey, returned to her company as co-CEO—less than one month after stepping down amid the backlash from a bombshell story by The Verge that pulled back the curtain on Away’s vicious work culture and included bullying Slack messages Korey had sent to her employees.

Korey told the New York Times that stepping down was a mistake: “Frankly, we let some inaccurate reporting influence the timeline of a transition plan that we had.” Away has not specified what was inaccurate in The Verge’s story; the parts of the story that caused the most outrage were Slack messages leaked by people inside the company, and Korey did not deny sending them (in an apology, she said “I was appalled and embarrassed reading them”), so it’s unclear what the company is disputing. In a followup story, The Verge also reported that Away ordered its employees not to share the original damning article or interact with it on social media in any form.

The message of Korey’s return appears to be: We’ve decided we don’t care about the press, and will just ignore it.

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, applauded that conclusion. The Times wrote in its story that Away’s board felt like it “fell victim to management by Twitter mob.” Graham tweeted out the story and said, “Prediction: Organizations will gradually learn that Twitter mobs are not representative, and can safely be ignored.”

The problem with that thinking is that the outraged tweets from the “mob” were mostly tweets sharing the contents of the article, tweets decrying the messages that Korey actually sent.

What Away’s reversal really shows is the growing hostility toward the press for reporting critically on what is going on inside these hyped, well-funded new companies.

And Away isn’t the only one.

The cycle of damage control

On Jan. 16, Meg Whitman, the former HP CEO now running the new short-form streaming service Quibi, compared reporters to sexual predators at a Quibi all-hands meeting, The Information reported. While noting her frustration that someone at Quibi had leaked an internal memo to the media, Whitman reportedly compared the way that reporters cultivate relationships with sources to the way sexual predators “groom” children.

Quibi’s initial response was to say in a statement, “This reporting from The Information is materially inaccurate.” It added that the access Quibi had given to the media in the past, including The Information, shows that “Quibi has the utmost respect for journalists.”

But just three days later, Whitman apologized. She said that her remarks were “mostly accurately portrayed” by The Information after all, and said, “I used an analogy that was inappropriate and just plain wrong... I didn’t intend it, and it’s not at all how I think, how I feel.”

Back in 2014, Des Hague, the CEO of Centerplate, a stadium catering company, was caught on a security camera angrily kicking a small dog inside an elevator. The company’s multiple attempts at response to the resulting backlash gave a lesson in how companies initially attempt to quell a P.R. crisis. At first, Hague simply apologized: “I am ashamed and deeply embarrassed… a minor frustration with a friend’s pet caused me to lose control of my emotional response.” But the outrage continued, so the next day Centerplate announced that Hague would also undergo anger management counseling (but keep his CEO job). The outrage grew louder, so two days after the initial incident, Centerplate said Hague would go on probation, donate $100,000 to a dog charity, and do 1,000 hours of community service (but keep his CEO job). It still wasn’t enough, as social media users were supporting a petition for Hague to be fired, and finally, one week after the incident, Centerplate fired Hague. (He’s now the CEO of a frozen food company called Froozer.)

WeWork navigated the same cycle after its S-1 filing to go public raised major red flags and prompted new reporting about its leadership and culture problems. WeWork initially responded by amending its S-1 to water down CEO Adam Neumann’s voting power; then it postponed its IPO; then it halted its IPO indefinitely and eventually ousted Neumann completely.

Tech’s new response to criticism

In an era when VCs are throwing capital at hot startups, stoking big valuations that in turn beget more hype and attention, critical press is often seen by the companies and their investors as an attack. The roadmap for companies in response to negative stories is increasingly to defend, accuse, or outright ignore. Tech founders and VCs see the press as adversarial.

Anna Wiener, author of the bestselling new memoir “Uncanny Valley,” worked for three years in tech (at e-book app Oyster and then at developer community GitHub, before it was acquired by Microsoft) and says she has noticed the same trend.

“The response to criticism right now seems to be incredibly defensive,” Wiener told Yahoo Finance. “Paul Graham just published a blog post about haters. It’s this interpretation of criticism—often [criticism] that is leveraged in good faith—as jealousy or contempt. And I do think it is shaping the political trajectory of people in the industry... This is a moment when disregarding the media is normalized. This is an industry that’s very accustomed to shaping its own narrative and having the media engage with it on its own terms and buy into that narrative. So the shock of increased criticism is what we’re seeing now manifest as a defensive, reactionary deflection.”

Theranos, the infamous fraudulent blood testing company, repeatedly denied and rejected the reporting of The Wall Street Journal about its misleading marketing and faulty practices, with employees even chanting at one point, “F**k you Carreyrou” about John Carreyrou, the reporter who kept breaking bad news about the company. (Some employees also made a video game called “Haters gonna hate” in which they shot Theranos equipment at Carreyrou’s head.) Eventually, the house of cards collapsed.

As Fast Company wrote in 2018, “It’s worth remembering how Theranos first responded to the WSJ exposé.” Indeed, it’s still worth remembering in 2020, whenever you see critical reporting about tech unicorns.

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Daniel Roberts is an editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance and closely covers tech. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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