Google offered a more complete defense of its lobbying efforts Friday in response to a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week that suggested the search giant’s lobbyists seem to be practically living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
In a GIF-y post entitled “Really, Rupert?” Google offered up a point-by-point repudiation of the Journal story, which showed how an awful lot of Googlers were visiting the White House as the FTC was investigating the company for allegedly anticompetitive practices. Its conclusion:
Google didn’t even link to the Journal story in its GIF-y reply (burn!).
“Of course we’ve had many meetings at the White House over the years,” Google wrote, noting that five of those visits were from “a Google engineer on leave helping to fix technical issues with the government’s Healthcare.gov website (something he’s been very public about).”
Google’s defense is basically that yes, its lobbyists and executives visited the White House lots of times, but that was because they were trying to influence the Obama administration on lots of different issues, including patent reform, trade, cyber security and NSA reform (well, they didn’t mention that one in the post).
Google says Microsofties visited 270 times during the same time period and Comcast* people were there 150 times. “The meetings we did have were not to discuss the antitrust investigation,” the company said.
Earlier this week, the FTC also took issue with the Journal’s lobbying story — as well as its initial piece about the agency’s decision not to sue Google over antitrust concerns — saying that the paper had made “a number of misleading inferences and suggestions about the integrity of the FTC’s investigation.”
In response, a WSJ spokeswoman said the paper’s story was “careful, accurate and fair.”
This is the second time this week Google’s press people have used GIFs to respond to reporters. Earlier this week, a YouTube spokesman sent another GIF response to a Daily Dot reporter looking for comment on a story.
This is actually the second letter in Google’s “Dear Rupert” series, as the search giant and the legendary media baron have continued to go at it over Google’s business practices.
Your turn, Rupert. We’re totally:
* Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is a minority investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’s parent company.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
