I noted earlier how Wal-Mart is using the take-no-prisoners discrediting strategies of political campaigning to respond to increasingly well-funded, sophisticated attacks from critics.
The company’s latest move comes right out of the Swift Boat playbook. And it could become standard procedure for other corporations that find themselves in the center of public controversy.
These companies often grumble that any effort to promote the good things they do is reported by most news media as self-serving PR spin. Meanwhile, they complain, critics of the company usually have their allegations represented at face value, without so much as a hint about their motives or where their money comes from.
No, it’s not a pinko left-wing anti-business liberal media conspiracy. But yes, I see it happen enough to expect it.
At the same time, corporate activist sites like SourceWatch have used the Internet to reveal who’s behind the talking heads representing various business interests. And every large company attracts anti-whatever blogs exposing supposed unethical practices and obscene profits. Even with their obvious bias, these sites have understandably become informational resources for journalists and interest groups wanting to pierce the polished veneer of a corporation’s issues and crises communications campaign.
Now Wal-Mart is hoping to level the playing field of public opinion by throwing a little bit of that information-age transparency on its own critics.
A group called Working Families for Wal-Mart -- which everyone knows is funded primarily by the company – has launched paidcritics.com. It’s a name-calling, nastily aggressive little website designed to "to let people know about the real motives of the union leaders behind the campaign against Wal-Mart."
The site mostly goes after WakeUpWalMart.com, which in reality is as much an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers union as Working Families is a department of Wal-Mart.
Under bold all-caps headlines, the site chronicles what it considers proof of the group’s heavy-handed extremism and blatant hypocrisy. One post links back to a news story quoting a union official telling church-goers that Wal-Mart executives are “not Christian people. They're not good Americans. They're an evil, evil company, and they need to be stopped." Another laughs at how the “desperate front group” used free booze to convince union members to show up for an anti Wal-Mart protest.
Other Wal-Mart critics get the treatment, too. A recent item skewers Wal-Mart Watch chief Andrew Grossman, who in his previous two-year gig at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “had no problem” accepting $20,000 in campaign contributions from the company. Mr. Grossman’s organization was created by another labor group, the Service Employees International Union.
It’s obvious that Wal-Mart’s union-sponsored opposition groups don’t quite know how to deal with the critical spotlight being thrown back on them this way. WakeUpWalMart.com spokesman Chris Kofinis tried to keep to his talking points when he told the Wall Street Journal that “It's so sad that to see Wal-Mart, a $300 billion dollar company with... a terrible public image, fund another in-the-gutter publicity stunt to attack the very people who want to change Wal-Mart and America for the better."
But anyone reading through paidcritic.com would know he was going say something just like that. And that’s why Mr. Kofinis’ goofy retort sounds as hollow as it is.
Score one for the mega retailer.
S2
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Wall Street Journal | Wal-Mart Backers Take On Critics With New Web Site
Scatterbox | Wal-Mart uses political campaign tactics to win consumers. Or maybe not.
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