History and Histrionic
Wal-Mart and the Media
Most information taken from
In Sam We Trust by Bob Ortega
“Media Lick the Hand That Feeds Them”By Peter Hart & Janine Jackson
Extra! The magazine of FAIR (Dec. 2005)
*(a media watchdog group)
Just how tough has media coverage of Wal-Mart been?
*Perhaps Wal-Mart’s ad money buys friendly coverage.
“There is a growing groundswell of critical concern about the company, but activists are leading the way, with most media, so far, trailing well behind.”
Self-Documentation
Eric Morgenthaler (Wall Street Journal) began ghostwriting Sam Walton’s autobiography, but when Sam found out he was dying of cancer, he fired him: “I never wanted to do this book.” Finally, he bought the notes and Fortune editor John Huey wrote Sam Walton: Made in America (1992)
Early in-house media
Early 1980s: Too many stores to visit (600)
Wal-Mart executive and technology guru Jack Shewmaker convinced Sam Walton to sit in front of a camera at headquarters, give one of his patented pep talks, and have it beamed live over TV screens to workers in every Wal-Mart store and warehouse in the country.
“The company’s image seemed to have mutated almost overnight”
Donaldsonville, LA (1981)
Pawhuska, OK (1986)
*“Arrival of Discounter Tears the Civic Fabric of Small-Town Life” (WSJ)
**Loss leaders were illegal in Oklahoma
***Sam spent $80,000 lobbying to have the law repealed
Steamboat Springs (1986)
*Denver newspapers and USA Today do stories
**“The USA’s richest man is getting a cold shoulder from this Rocky Mountain ski town”
***Walton declined to be interviewed
More national coverage followed
Steamboat Springs (‘86): The First of Many Store Wars
Planning commission demanded that Wal-Mart change the design
*Wal-Mart sued, claiming conspiracy
*Wal-Mart paid locals to gather signatures on petitions asking for a referendum
*Media coverage followed
*Wal-Mart sent two people to City Council meeting; Voted 4-2 to allow Wal-Mart in
*Citizens gathered 927 petitions in 2 days for a referendum; rejected by city council
*Judge orders referendum; Wal-Mart walks away. Steamboat gets Wal-Mart in 1992
“Here, for the first time, Wal-Mart articulated a stance that later would come back to haunt it.”
*“If some community, for whatever reason, doesn’t want us in there, we aren’t interested in going in.”Sam Walton
*Communities then knew -- if they couldn’t stop Wal-Mart, at least they could make it look hypocritical
The Deluge of Resistance Begins
*Lincoln, Nebraska
*Salina, Kansas
*Jackson Hole, Wyoming
*Iowa City, Iowa
*Bemidji, Minnesota
Wal-Mart doesn’t come to Bemidji (1990)
*Beltrami county board sells old 22.23-acre fairgrounds property to Target for $72,000 per acre, even though Wal-Mart had offered $80,000 per acre!
**Target was said to be more “upscale”
**“They came to us first”
**“Target is a good corporate citizen”
*Commissioner Rodney Benson said he had “never seen anything like it!”
“Making the Target decision”
by Mary Hoekstra, The Pioneer, 9/90
*Bemidji Area Chamber of Commerce had done its homework
**Set up a 9/4/90 seminar led by Economics Prof. Kenneth Stone
***“The impact of Wal-Mart Stores on other businesses in Iowa”
*The Chamber is “very cognizant of what the introduction of another mass merchandiser means in relation to additional competition and market segmentation, especially to small businesses. . .”
Follow the Money Trail
*John Loftus complains to publisher of Pioneer about how the board is portrayed
**Demands to know the identity of an unnamed source paraphrased as saying Wal-Mart would be “continuing developing markets in northern Minnesota. . .but probably not in Bemidji.”
*Mary Hoekstra and her editor, Susan Baratono, refuse to name their source
**They are fired
*Journalism Prof. Louise Mengelkoch testifies at Baratono’s hearing for her unemployment claim; she supports Baratono by saying that it’s standard journalistic practice to protect unnamed sources
*Baratono wins; she reportedly later sues the paper for wrongful dismissal and prevails
So who is the masked man from Iowa?
Dr. Ken Stone, economist, worked for Iowa State’s extension service
*“A tall, thin, bifocal-wearing man who considered himself a bit of a bore as a speaker. . .became a small town consulting star, courtesy of Wal-Mart”
*Conducted the first formal study to look at the “Wal-Mart Effect”
**Picked 10 towns and studied retail-tax records; also looked at 45 towns without Wal-Marts
**The figures were “terrifying”
**Helped business that didn’t directly compete; destroyed the rest
Stone is under siege
*Found that a typical Wal-Mart took more than 3/4 of its sales from existing businesses
**“Stone soon found himself sending copies of his study to hundreds of towns around the country”
**Sam Walton and his executives were equally aghast. . .Stone fielded one angry phone call after another from Bentonville. . .reporters, town planners, business groups.
Wal-Mart Retaliates
*Stone accused of lying and making up numbers
*Wal-Mart pays for its own biased study, which is uncritically picked up by smaller newspapers, but savaged by the national media
*Ken Stone had no personal bias against Wal-Mart and often shopped there
Media coverage begins in earnest
*1985: Forbes named him the richest man in the country ($2.8 billion)
*Scores of reporters clamored for interviews, but Walton refused them all
*People magazine featured him as the magnate of the week
*New York Post ran a huge photo of him getting his usual $5 haircut
*San Francisco Chronicle: “America’s richest nobody”
*Later in life Sam lashes out at media “scavengers”
*Articles continued unabated, focusing on his down-home image -- no interviews allowed
The Golden Years
*1986: ran national TV commercials on the “Buy America” theme
**It depends on the meaning of the words “made in America”
*Polls showed it to be one of the most respected companies in America
*March 1992: Pres. Bush presents Sam with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
*April 6, 1992: Sam dies of myeloma
The Gloves are Off
*December 1992: David Glass, Sam’s successor, goes on Dateline NBC
**The Made in USA claim is challenged
*Glass bombs -- says he knows nothing about Bangladesh factories
**Glass asks for a second interview; bombs again (pp. 226-227)
**Says Asian workers may look younger because they’re small!
*Charges based on sweatshop raids conducted by Star Tribune reporter Mike Meyers!
Organized labor gets media coverage
*Mother’s Day press conferences
*Child labor story: 60 Minutes does NOT bite, but Harry Wu’s evidence gains momentum
**Wal-Mart dismisses concerns at 1991 annual meeting
*Harry Wu says he hadn’t seen a meeting like that since the last Communist rally he’d been forced to attend in China!
Glass pays for his willingness to cooperate with the news media
*Glass is “sandbagged” on Dateline NBC (again) -- Bangladesh returns to haunt
**Glass threatens to pull GE products from shelves of Wal-Mart
**He makes a 45-minute video for all employees to watch
**PR people draft vendors in “spontaneous” outburst of support
***encouraged to buy newspaper ads defending “Made in USA” claims
*Dec. 22, 1992(?): Dateline seen by 14 million households -- worse than imagined
*Dec. 23, 1992(?): Wal-Mart buys a barrage of ads for their suppliers
**Reporters say they look suspiciously alike
*Wal-Mart employees and suppliers encouraged to phone in and write letters to NBC and GE (7,000 to be exact)
*Wal-Mart plays “bizarre” commentary by Paul Harvey in stores in lieu of Xmas party
*David Glass writes commentary in newspapers (find this!)
*Nike gets attacked for offshore practices
*CBS, LA Times, Harper’s, Portland Oregonian
**“They’re better off than they would be without that job.”
**Phil Knight
*Wal-Mart pulls out of factories with problems, thereby punishing workers who tried to improve conditions
“This could never have happened if Sam Walton was alive!”
*What was the headline for Target’s full-page newspaper ads in six states accusing Wal-Mart of cheating on price comparisons that it posted in its stores?
**“In a perverse way, the ads showed how effectively Sam Walton’s sterling image had been set in the popular imagination.”
*Wal-Mart agreed to stop running price-comparison ads in its stores and to change its slogan from
**“Always the low price. Always” to
**“Always low prices. Always”
Organized opposition
*Al Norman of Greenfield, MA, becomes a professional Wal-Mart stopper
**“Stop the Wal” bumper stickers
**Full-page ads in local newspapers
**Opposition research
**Wal-Mart had funded biased polls, phony citizen groups, etc.
**Other big-box retail chains run into similar opposition (“category killers”)
*“The protests have grown in proportion to the relentless, expansionary march of behemoth retailers.”
*Time magazine’s Sophronia Scott Gregory
Everyone gets more sophisticated
*1993: Al Norman creates a “blueprint for how to fight”
**Travels to NY, PA, VT
**Anti-Wal-Mart activists began to form a network
*Wal-Mart beefs up its PR division
**Monitors all news coverage of Wal-Mart and create counterattacks (“AstroTurf” operations); secretly pays for ads
**Tries to become friends with National Trust
Communities under attack
*1994: “Doonesbury” focuses on Wal-Mart for two weeks
*The Amish fight Wal-Mart in Lancaster, PA
*April 1995: 60 Minutes airs a critical segment about Wal-Mart’s impact on small towns, featuring Lancaster
*Wal-Mart executive appears on local TV and bombs
**Reporter becomes so disturbed, he begins to denounce Wal-Mart on other media
The Kathie Lee Gifford Fracas
*1995: Wal-Mart picks her to compete against Kmart’s Jaclyn Smith clothing line
*Charles Kernaghan goes after The Gap’s offshore suppliers and stumbles across Kathie Lee Gifford labels in Honduras
*New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes a series denouncing sweatshops
The melodrama escalates
*April 29, 1996: Kernaghan testifies at a hearing on Capitol Hill
**Reports that he saw 100 children working 13-hour days, earning less than 10 cents per hr.
*That night: Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight do stories
*Next day: KLG cries on air
**“How dare you!” she rages
***Time magazine calls it a “not-my-fault, TV hissy fit”
Kathie Lee becomes the “sweatshop queen”
*Kernaghan is inundated with phone calls for interviews
**He challenges Kathie Lee to travel to the factories and see with her own eyes
*KL hires the best PR guy she can afford (Howard Rubenstein)
**Goes on Prime Time Live and cries
**Says she will hire inspectors
The NY Daily News Nightmare
*Union leaders leak a story about illegal immigrants working in sweatshop conditions blocks from KL’s studio
*They choose the Daily News over the NY Times because they want the tabloid aspect
*Rubenstein pays workers $100 bills
*Kernaghan brings 15-year-old Wendy Diaz to put a face on the story
**Tells of supporting her 3 brothers on $22/wk.
*Kathie Lee appeals to Michael Jordan and Jaclyn Smith to help
**“I don’t know the complete situation.” Michael Jordan
*Cheryl Tiegs and Richard Simmons do so
*1997: Hard Copy airs a 3-part story on workers in Nicaragua
**Miami Herald opines that perhaps those jobs are better than no jobs at all
Late 90s: Where’s Sam?
*1995: Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko writes about Eric Matthy
**Had his truck stolen by a Sam’s Club employee while being worked on
**Wal-Mart refused to help him out
*“Penny-pinching myopia”
The current media climate
*42,300,000 hits on the Internet
*Numerous books, documentaries, articles, blogs, websites, consultants, activist groups, etc., etc.
*LA Times Pulitzer-Prize-winning series
*What made Wal-Mart so vulnerable so late in the game?
**My opinion: The gap between the myth and the reality that became apparent with Sam’s death
***The news media smell blood when this happens
Yet to come
Media coverage of the return of Wal-Mart to Bemidji in 2000! Stay tuned.
Most information taken from
In Sam We Trust by Bob Ortega
“Media Lick the Hand That Feeds Them”By Peter Hart & Janine Jackson
Extra! The magazine of FAIR (Dec. 2005)
*(a media watchdog group)
Just how tough has media coverage of Wal-Mart been?
*Perhaps Wal-Mart’s ad money buys friendly coverage.
“There is a growing groundswell of critical concern about the company, but activists are leading the way, with most media, so far, trailing well behind.”
Self-Documentation
Eric Morgenthaler (Wall Street Journal) began ghostwriting Sam Walton’s autobiography, but when Sam found out he was dying of cancer, he fired him: “I never wanted to do this book.” Finally, he bought the notes and Fortune editor John Huey wrote Sam Walton: Made in America (1992)
Early in-house media
Early 1980s: Too many stores to visit (600)
Wal-Mart executive and technology guru Jack Shewmaker convinced Sam Walton to sit in front of a camera at headquarters, give one of his patented pep talks, and have it beamed live over TV screens to workers in every Wal-Mart store and warehouse in the country.
“The company’s image seemed to have mutated almost overnight”
Donaldsonville, LA (1981)
Pawhuska, OK (1986)
*“Arrival of Discounter Tears the Civic Fabric of Small-Town Life” (WSJ)
**Loss leaders were illegal in Oklahoma
***Sam spent $80,000 lobbying to have the law repealed
Steamboat Springs (1986)
*Denver newspapers and USA Today do stories
**“The USA’s richest man is getting a cold shoulder from this Rocky Mountain ski town”
***Walton declined to be interviewed
More national coverage followed
Steamboat Springs (‘86): The First of Many Store Wars
Planning commission demanded that Wal-Mart change the design
*Wal-Mart sued, claiming conspiracy
*Wal-Mart paid locals to gather signatures on petitions asking for a referendum
*Media coverage followed
*Wal-Mart sent two people to City Council meeting; Voted 4-2 to allow Wal-Mart in
*Citizens gathered 927 petitions in 2 days for a referendum; rejected by city council
*Judge orders referendum; Wal-Mart walks away. Steamboat gets Wal-Mart in 1992
“Here, for the first time, Wal-Mart articulated a stance that later would come back to haunt it.”
*“If some community, for whatever reason, doesn’t want us in there, we aren’t interested in going in.”Sam Walton
*Communities then knew -- if they couldn’t stop Wal-Mart, at least they could make it look hypocritical
The Deluge of Resistance Begins
*Lincoln, Nebraska
*Salina, Kansas
*Jackson Hole, Wyoming
*Iowa City, Iowa
*Bemidji, Minnesota
Wal-Mart doesn’t come to Bemidji (1990)
*Beltrami county board sells old 22.23-acre fairgrounds property to Target for $72,000 per acre, even though Wal-Mart had offered $80,000 per acre!
**Target was said to be more “upscale”
**“They came to us first”
**“Target is a good corporate citizen”
*Commissioner Rodney Benson said he had “never seen anything like it!”
“Making the Target decision”
by Mary Hoekstra, The Pioneer, 9/90
*Bemidji Area Chamber of Commerce had done its homework
**Set up a 9/4/90 seminar led by Economics Prof. Kenneth Stone
***“The impact of Wal-Mart Stores on other businesses in Iowa”
*The Chamber is “very cognizant of what the introduction of another mass merchandiser means in relation to additional competition and market segmentation, especially to small businesses. . .”
Follow the Money Trail
*John Loftus complains to publisher of Pioneer about how the board is portrayed
**Demands to know the identity of an unnamed source paraphrased as saying Wal-Mart would be “continuing developing markets in northern Minnesota. . .but probably not in Bemidji.”
*Mary Hoekstra and her editor, Susan Baratono, refuse to name their source
**They are fired
*Journalism Prof. Louise Mengelkoch testifies at Baratono’s hearing for her unemployment claim; she supports Baratono by saying that it’s standard journalistic practice to protect unnamed sources
*Baratono wins; she reportedly later sues the paper for wrongful dismissal and prevails
So who is the masked man from Iowa?
Dr. Ken Stone, economist, worked for Iowa State’s extension service
*“A tall, thin, bifocal-wearing man who considered himself a bit of a bore as a speaker. . .became a small town consulting star, courtesy of Wal-Mart”
*Conducted the first formal study to look at the “Wal-Mart Effect”
**Picked 10 towns and studied retail-tax records; also looked at 45 towns without Wal-Marts
**The figures were “terrifying”
**Helped business that didn’t directly compete; destroyed the rest
Stone is under siege
*Found that a typical Wal-Mart took more than 3/4 of its sales from existing businesses
**“Stone soon found himself sending copies of his study to hundreds of towns around the country”
**Sam Walton and his executives were equally aghast. . .Stone fielded one angry phone call after another from Bentonville. . .reporters, town planners, business groups.
Wal-Mart Retaliates
*Stone accused of lying and making up numbers
*Wal-Mart pays for its own biased study, which is uncritically picked up by smaller newspapers, but savaged by the national media
*Ken Stone had no personal bias against Wal-Mart and often shopped there
Media coverage begins in earnest
*1985: Forbes named him the richest man in the country ($2.8 billion)
*Scores of reporters clamored for interviews, but Walton refused them all
*People magazine featured him as the magnate of the week
*New York Post ran a huge photo of him getting his usual $5 haircut
*San Francisco Chronicle: “America’s richest nobody”
*Later in life Sam lashes out at media “scavengers”
*Articles continued unabated, focusing on his down-home image -- no interviews allowed
The Golden Years
*1986: ran national TV commercials on the “Buy America” theme
**It depends on the meaning of the words “made in America”
*Polls showed it to be one of the most respected companies in America
*March 1992: Pres. Bush presents Sam with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
*April 6, 1992: Sam dies of myeloma
The Gloves are Off
*December 1992: David Glass, Sam’s successor, goes on Dateline NBC
**The Made in USA claim is challenged
*Glass bombs -- says he knows nothing about Bangladesh factories
**Glass asks for a second interview; bombs again (pp. 226-227)
**Says Asian workers may look younger because they’re small!
*Charges based on sweatshop raids conducted by Star Tribune reporter Mike Meyers!
Organized labor gets media coverage
*Mother’s Day press conferences
*Child labor story: 60 Minutes does NOT bite, but Harry Wu’s evidence gains momentum
**Wal-Mart dismisses concerns at 1991 annual meeting
*Harry Wu says he hadn’t seen a meeting like that since the last Communist rally he’d been forced to attend in China!
Glass pays for his willingness to cooperate with the news media
*Glass is “sandbagged” on Dateline NBC (again) -- Bangladesh returns to haunt
**Glass threatens to pull GE products from shelves of Wal-Mart
**He makes a 45-minute video for all employees to watch
**PR people draft vendors in “spontaneous” outburst of support
***encouraged to buy newspaper ads defending “Made in USA” claims
*Dec. 22, 1992(?): Dateline seen by 14 million households -- worse than imagined
*Dec. 23, 1992(?): Wal-Mart buys a barrage of ads for their suppliers
**Reporters say they look suspiciously alike
*Wal-Mart employees and suppliers encouraged to phone in and write letters to NBC and GE (7,000 to be exact)
*Wal-Mart plays “bizarre” commentary by Paul Harvey in stores in lieu of Xmas party
*David Glass writes commentary in newspapers (find this!)
*Nike gets attacked for offshore practices
*CBS, LA Times, Harper’s, Portland Oregonian
**“They’re better off than they would be without that job.”
**Phil Knight
*Wal-Mart pulls out of factories with problems, thereby punishing workers who tried to improve conditions
“This could never have happened if Sam Walton was alive!”
*What was the headline for Target’s full-page newspaper ads in six states accusing Wal-Mart of cheating on price comparisons that it posted in its stores?
**“In a perverse way, the ads showed how effectively Sam Walton’s sterling image had been set in the popular imagination.”
*Wal-Mart agreed to stop running price-comparison ads in its stores and to change its slogan from
**“Always the low price. Always” to
**“Always low prices. Always”
Organized opposition
*Al Norman of Greenfield, MA, becomes a professional Wal-Mart stopper
**“Stop the Wal” bumper stickers
**Full-page ads in local newspapers
**Opposition research
**Wal-Mart had funded biased polls, phony citizen groups, etc.
**Other big-box retail chains run into similar opposition (“category killers”)
*“The protests have grown in proportion to the relentless, expansionary march of behemoth retailers.”
*Time magazine’s Sophronia Scott Gregory
Everyone gets more sophisticated
*1993: Al Norman creates a “blueprint for how to fight”
**Travels to NY, PA, VT
**Anti-Wal-Mart activists began to form a network
*Wal-Mart beefs up its PR division
**Monitors all news coverage of Wal-Mart and create counterattacks (“AstroTurf” operations); secretly pays for ads
**Tries to become friends with National Trust
Communities under attack
*1994: “Doonesbury” focuses on Wal-Mart for two weeks
*The Amish fight Wal-Mart in Lancaster, PA
*April 1995: 60 Minutes airs a critical segment about Wal-Mart’s impact on small towns, featuring Lancaster
*Wal-Mart executive appears on local TV and bombs
**Reporter becomes so disturbed, he begins to denounce Wal-Mart on other media
The Kathie Lee Gifford Fracas
*1995: Wal-Mart picks her to compete against Kmart’s Jaclyn Smith clothing line
*Charles Kernaghan goes after The Gap’s offshore suppliers and stumbles across Kathie Lee Gifford labels in Honduras
*New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes a series denouncing sweatshops
The melodrama escalates
*April 29, 1996: Kernaghan testifies at a hearing on Capitol Hill
**Reports that he saw 100 children working 13-hour days, earning less than 10 cents per hr.
*That night: Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight do stories
*Next day: KLG cries on air
**“How dare you!” she rages
***Time magazine calls it a “not-my-fault, TV hissy fit”
Kathie Lee becomes the “sweatshop queen”
*Kernaghan is inundated with phone calls for interviews
**He challenges Kathie Lee to travel to the factories and see with her own eyes
*KL hires the best PR guy she can afford (Howard Rubenstein)
**Goes on Prime Time Live and cries
**Says she will hire inspectors
The NY Daily News Nightmare
*Union leaders leak a story about illegal immigrants working in sweatshop conditions blocks from KL’s studio
*They choose the Daily News over the NY Times because they want the tabloid aspect
*Rubenstein pays workers $100 bills
*Kernaghan brings 15-year-old Wendy Diaz to put a face on the story
**Tells of supporting her 3 brothers on $22/wk.
*Kathie Lee appeals to Michael Jordan and Jaclyn Smith to help
**“I don’t know the complete situation.” Michael Jordan
*Cheryl Tiegs and Richard Simmons do so
*1997: Hard Copy airs a 3-part story on workers in Nicaragua
**Miami Herald opines that perhaps those jobs are better than no jobs at all
Late 90s: Where’s Sam?
*1995: Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko writes about Eric Matthy
**Had his truck stolen by a Sam’s Club employee while being worked on
**Wal-Mart refused to help him out
*“Penny-pinching myopia”
The current media climate
*42,300,000 hits on the Internet
*Numerous books, documentaries, articles, blogs, websites, consultants, activist groups, etc., etc.
*LA Times Pulitzer-Prize-winning series
*What made Wal-Mart so vulnerable so late in the game?
**My opinion: The gap between the myth and the reality that became apparent with Sam’s death
***The news media smell blood when this happens
Yet to come
Media coverage of the return of Wal-Mart to Bemidji in 2000! Stay tuned.
posted by Louise Mengelkoch at
8:53 AM
