Wal-Mart: Always Deep Pockets, Always

In January 2005, readers across the country all saw the same thing in their morning paper: an ad for Wal-Mart. That in itself is no surprise -- Wal-Mart is, after all, the largest corporation in the world -- but this particular ad, which ran in more than a hundred papers, was different: it consisted of a rebuttal of arguments lodged by the retail behemoth's critics.

Subject to condemnation for business practices ranging from low pay and stingy healthcare benefits to exporting jobs and destroying small businesses, Wal-Mart is also the subject of litigation, including a class action discrimination suit representing 1.6 million current and former female workers who accuse the company of systematic underpayment and lack of promotion.

The ad blitz was something of a two-fer for Wal-Mart, since many outlets thought it interesting enough to report as actual news, including USA Today, which ran two stories on it.

It was just part of a PR offensive that included big-money charitable donations (dutifully reported) and an April invitation to reporters to its Bentonville, Ark. headquarters for a "media day." The session was described as a "feisty response to critics" and a chance for Wal-Mart to "defend" itself and "dispel myths." Journalists were reportedly enjoined "to clear their minds of previous articles about the company and 'start with a clean slate'."

But the media image of a beleaguered corporation at last responding to a "horde of critics" raises at least one question: Just how tough has media scrutiny of Wal-Mart really been? "You've heard the firestorm of criticism about the company, about wages, benefits, union-busting, about locking employees in, about making them work overtime without paying them for it," ABC's Charlie Gibson said in introducing a Good Morning America interview with CEO Lee Scott. But how much have most people really heard about these issues?

There has without question been some hard-hitting investigative reporting on Wal-Mart's controversial business practices, including a 2003 Los Angeles Times series that nabbed a Pulitzer Prize, and a probing report on PBS's Frontline.

More typical, however, are accounts like Time's "Wal-Mart Nation." Focusing on Wal-Mart's Chinese enterprises, the article has an undeniably cheerleading theme: Wal-Mart is staging a "revolution" in China, in part by "spreading a management style that many of its young Chinese employees find liberating."

Time introduced "quintessential Wal-Mart guy" Joe Hatfield ("I was blessed to work for Sam Walton") and followed his tour through a Shenzhen Wal-Mart, where, he enthused, "We're bringing people a great shopping experience!" "Chinese customers," Time added helpfully, "seem to agree."

As in many articles, what criticisms were included Time allowed Wal-Mart to trump. What about complaints that the industry giant's use of cheap overseas labor undercuts U.S. workers? Time left unchallenged Hatfield's response that "if you stop stuff from [abroad] coming into the U.S., it would mean $180 blue jeans. Is that what Americans want?" Time didn't point out that it's easy to find U.S.-made jeans for less than $30.

But the magazine did step in when a spokesperson from Sweatshop Watch noted that Wal-Mart's policies make it "both a beneficiary and a driver of the race to the bottom in the global economy." The article followed the statement with its own rebuttal: "But that may be less true than it was 20 years ago." Many of Wal-Mart's suppliers are operating in countries like Taiwan and Hong Kong, Time explained, and had long ago left U.S. workers. So Wal-Mart "may indeed be eliminating factory jobs, but in South Korea, not South Carolina." It's unclear how this undermined the point that Wal-Mart drives the economic race to the bottom; it seems more an argument that it's been largely successful.