All The Slant That's Fit To Print

The New York Times wants its readers to know that Wal-Mart has been distributing email messages to bloggers in a campaign to put positive information about the company into the blogosphere. Wal-Mart has been aboveboard about the campaign, stating that it has been working with bloggers since late 2005 in an effort to "tell our story."

Wal-Mart doesn't pay bloggers nor are the bloggers in any way affiliated with the company. Wal-Mart simply gives the bloggers advance notice of newsworthy pieces of company-related information. Notably, however, the NYT has found instances where bloggers simply cut and pasted information from Wal-Mart emails and didn't cite Wal-Mart as the source of the words. The Times represents this practice as tainting the entire Wal-Mart effort, breaking a basic tenet of the blogosphere to identify sources of information.

As an attack on specific bloggers, the Times piece is appropos. Bloggers should always cite their sources, but bloggers are human. The failure of bloggers to cite sources of information happens all the time and it's more of a function of negligence than a lack of ethics. As such, it hardly seems to be a subject worthy of a lengthy piece in the New York Times.

However, as is typical, the Times article represents the subject as a nefarious tactic by Wal-Mart, leaving the impression that readers cannot trust any positive information they see in the blogosphere because it was planted by Wal-Mart, whether a source is cited or not. Even so, this backhanded besmirching of Wal-Mart is compounded by what the Times leaves out of its article.

In reporting why Wal-Mart is inserting positive information into the blogosphere, the Times accurately states that the company is trying to balance the attacks from two groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, which "aggressively prod it to change." Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart are described as groups who "operate blogs that receive posts from current and former Wal-Mart employees, elected leaders and consumers." This assertion is disingenuous because it implies that the campaign opposing Wal-Mart is driven by consumers and employees. The implication is false.

What the Times fails to mention is that Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart are partnered with and get their marching orders from Democracy For America (DFA), a group founded by former presidential candidate and DNC leader Howard Dean with a "long-term goal to rebuild the Democratic Party from the bottom up." DFA is chaired by Howard Dean's brother, James H. Dean, a long-time Democratic party organizer. The Executive Director of DFA is Tom Hughes, another Democrat operative and former advance man for Al Gore.

Also, the Times neglects to inform its readers that Wake Up Wal-Mart is an information portal for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW). In fact, the entire website of Wake Up Wal-Mart is copyrighted by the UFCW.

In a nutshell, the New York Times article is putting the stink of nefariousness on Wal-Mart for attempting to legitimately convey some positive information about the company. While doing so, the Times fails to disclose that the forces aligned against Wal-Mart are part of an orchestrated political effort by well-funded Democratic Party operatives and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. So, what stinks more?

Read the New York Times for "All the slant that's fit to print."

Tags: Wal-Mart, New York Times, bloggers