The New York Times continued hammering away at Wal-Mart today in an above-the-fold story in its Business section. Coming under fire was HUMAN EVENTS contributor Marshall Manson, who works for Edelman, the PR firm hired by Wal-Mart for shaping its message.
The Times seeks to portray
Here’s an excerpt:
In the messages, Wal-Mart promotes positive news about itself, like the high number of job applications it received at a new store in Illinois, and criticizes opponents, noting for example that a rival, Target, raised "zero" money for the Salvation Army in 2005, because it banned red-kettle collectors from stores.
The author of the e-mail messages is a blogger named Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor at Edelman who writes for conservative Web sites like Human Events Online, which advocates limited government, and Confirm Them, which has pushed for the confirmation of President Bush’s judicial nominees.
Before I launched into my defense of
Now to the matter at hand. Marshall and I first met in early 2004 when he worked for the Center for Individual Freedom and I was a reporter at CNSNews.com. At the time, I had been following the Democrats’ obstructionist tactics against President Bush’s judicial nominees. Marshall, who cares passionately about the issue, was a great resource.
He still is today. That’s why last summer when HUMAN EVENTS launched The Right Angle, a new blog featuring a handful of rising stars,
Shortly after joining Edelman last fall, he alerted me that Wal-Mart would be his client and he wouldn’t be writing about the company. (Not once—even before he took the job with Edelman—has he authored a story about Wal-Mart.)
I reasoned that as long as he wasn’t writing about the clients he was representing—be it Wal-Mart or any other company Edelman represents—there was no reason to prevent him from contributing.
And so it has continued—albeit more sporadically than I would like. But I’m not paying
I don’t know how his bosses at Edelman reacted to today’s story—well, actually I do know how Edelman VP
The Times hopes to embarrass
So what’s the Times’ problem?
Last time I checked, reporters for the New York Times operate in much the same fashion. Don’t begin to tell me that the Times’ reporters aren’t getting tips every day from PR people—with the possible exception of Edelman. Why would the folks there waste their time when the Gray Lady has shown a pattern of attacking Wal-Mart?
Should bloggers have disclosed they got this information from
What are those rules? We’re still in the process of figuring that out. That’s what makes Edelman’s work all the more interesting.
Keep it up,
UPDATE — 10:13 p.m.: I neglected to mention the blog On Tap, featuring NRA News’ Cam Edwards and National Review’s Jim Geraghty (of TKS), which has carried some excellent material about this story.
