It's been a couple of weeks since word started spreading about Wal-Mart's new "War Room" made of political veterans to combat negative media attention. Wal-Mart has become a political target and the release of the new fake-u-mentory, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, with its endorsement by Ted Kennedy and the increasing anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric coming from the political left. Obviously, Wal-Mart has to defend itself on many levels.
Public perception is increasingly fickle and anybody with enough venom in front of enough cameras can say anything they want and be believed at face value. Today's reporters are too damn lazy to research facts and investigate the motives behind the spewing hatred. Byron York, who is investigating the claims of the film, already found out an interesting piece of information:
BYRON YORK, NATIONAL REVIEW: Well, the story of H&H Hardware didn’t actually happen precisely as it is depicted in the picture. The store did close, but it closed three months before Wal-Mart actually opened its doors. And I talked to Don Hunter, the man you saw in the film there, who founded H&H in 1962, and he said that the coming of Wal-Mart had nothing to do with the decision to close the store.
Like Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald is using images and emotion to try and create a reality to prove a political point. The people interviewed are real, but the timeline is off and the facts aren't quite all there. So this is not really documentary filmmaking as much as it is realistic fiction. The problem is that Wal-Mart feels it has to rely on itself to get the facts out. Byron York works for the The National Review, which causes credibility problems with the left, and he is in an apparent minority when it comes to researching the facts of this film.
Remember Michael Moore sitting next to Jimmy Carter at the Democrat National Convention? Now we have Robert Greenwald getting an endorsement from Ted Kennedy. This is a frightening trend and Wal-Mart is ahead of the curve by creating its own War Room. The PR battles are going to be intense. Wal-Mart has more than just its bottom line to think about. If I was an executive at Wal-Mart, I'd be deeply bothered by the political handling of how I did business. This is a prelude to regulation. When U.S. Senators publicly bad-mouth companies, you know they want to pass laws and make themselves into union heroes.
While the media fawns over this film, remember that Wal-Mart employs 1.5 million people worldwide. The more that Wal-Mart gets negative press and pulled into the left-versus-right political whirlwind, these people will be affected. Wal-Mart has already shown it will close stores rather than deal with unions. They will also have to raise prices to conform to unreasonable regulations, which seems okay to Kennedy. I'm interested in how the War Room will gear up and combat the politics. Somebody has to.
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