Slashdot Mirror
When A Blogger Meets Public Relations
fermion writes "The New York Times is running a story on the evolving relationship between PR departments and bloggers, specifically between the Wal*Mart PR people and sympathetic bloggers. The interesting thing in this story is not so much the astroturfing, which is old news, but the transformation of blogging from a personal statement to a corporate bullhorn. The bloggers mentioned in the story, who presumably are able to articulate their own opinions, received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text into the blogs. What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?"
The bloggers mentioned in the story, who presumably are able to articulate their own opinions, received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text into the blogs.
Wait, I don't understand. This is news? I thought it was common knowledge that a large portion of bloggers (the majority?) simply copy text from elsewhere as their "blog". Take Digg as an example. Digg integrates with many blogging services, allowing users to write commentary on the story, and link back to the Digg page from their blog. The feature is quite popular as most of the front page stories have a "blog" attached to them.
Now with such a feature, you would expect each blogger to provide insightful commentary on the issue at hand, right? Wrong. The majority of the blogs do nothing more than replicate the exact text from the Digg story. Not only are these blogs redundant, but they add another level of indirection to anyone who might happen upon them. ("Oh, so I go from blog, to Digg, to Link, right?") Ok, so the better blogs have a direct link AND a Digg link. But this is really nothing more than sydication of rather fluffy content.
Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about:
http://nik-hil.blogspot.com/
http://www.r00tware.com/
http://hackerslife.blogspot.com/
http://www.petesblog.com/
These are examples of "real" blogs with sydicated Digg content mixed in:
http://jacobsonster.blogspot.com/
http://howgoodisthis.wordpress.com/
Now these blogs aren't entirely without value. In many cases, it's a way of aligning your tastes with those of a particular blogger. i.e. That blogger only links to articles you want to know about. It's also good for the site that's being Dugg, as they have more links to their site.
But no, there's nothing magically articulate about bloggers. Plenty of them are happy to syndicate.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Good question.
KFG
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?
What is the use of a newspaper that just reports government press releases almost verbatim?
What is the use of a television channel if it copies its programming from somewhere else?
What is the use of a boy band just like every other boy band?
The mainstream media and blogs are beginning to watch over each other reciprocally. This is a good thing. It means that if either lies or fucks up, the other pounces down its throat.
Three (tentative) cheers for a free press?
People still tend to want to believe anything they read, but they shouldn't and routinely need to be reminded of that fact. Most importantly, people need to either accept what they read from various sources may not be true or accurate and be open to opposing information at any time, or learn to do their own fact checking and not accept anything as fact until fact checking confirms information.
Only those who are already skeptical will do that... the rest of us are simply too lazy.
Some people are "sympathetic" to Wal*Mart???
I'm sympathetic to wounded puppies, starving people, oppressed subcultures, the sick, the dying, abused children, and so on.. but multinational corporations are just not something I can rouse the neccessary emotional response to sympathise with.
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?
Blogs are used to clutter search engines. Where have you been the last few years? Most blogs are keyphrase link-fests. Another innovation from the world of online adult marketing. Porn coders could solve cancer if the money was there.
This is like the moveon.org paper-spammers. They literally get their marching orders from moveon.org and mindlessly send form letters to newspapers all over the country. I caught on to this when I read the exact same letter in two newspapers halfway across the country. I searched on one phrase in the letter in Google, and found the entire letter in Moveon.org, along with instructions for everyone to send it to their local paper (despite newspaper letter rules against form letters).
Astroturf blog and newspaper spamming.
We all know that "journalists" do this all the time. They quote from PR releases, and use video footage in their news reports.
Why shouldn't bloggers do this as well?
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?
Fascinating that a newspaper would run such a story, considering the huge numbers of newpaper articles that are barely rewritten press releases from special interest groups and politicians.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Wal-Mart was found out to be exploiting the US taxpayer by not providing adequate health benefits to its employees. How did they do this? They simply printed out instructions (in Spanish and English) to direct their employees to the nearest free clinic in the area.
Illegal? Maybe. Unethical?
Now that you know how they dodge their health costs, you can enjoy an article about the richest Americans. Five of the Richest Americans are Wal-Mart's owners and relatives of owners.
Maybe we should ask the Waltons how they feel about exploiting US Taxpayers?
Blogs that just repeat Wal-Mart PR, are not blogs, they are PR for Wal-Mart. This is done order to help continue their ways of exploiting their workers and the system.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Blogs are good at connecting to people that are hard to reach. Many of these people otherwise would not have found the press release. By repeating the contained information, they reach these viewers. So yes, the blog still servers a purpose -- by connecting those with a message, to those who may be interested in that message.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Traditional media, including newspapers, magazines and especially the local TV news do the same thing every day.
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments
Are you shitting me? This is a perfect description of the overwhelmingly majority of blogs! While some blogs feature original reporting or analysis, they're few are far between. Mostly it's: "Hey, spotted this open email from Michael Moore/Rush Limbaugh over at FreakyQuiblet's blog [Insert block quote from original text]. I agree this is awful/wonderful." The only issue here is that the poster doesn't like the politics of this group's particular echo-chamber.
Now we have shills on the internet, who cares. Just because it's online doesn't make any statements more true then anywhere else. In order to have a "voice of quality" you must first earn your reputation. The number of dullards who "read it on the internet, so it must be true" is thankfully getting smaller, as they knw to search for multiple sources of the same information.. and maybe read TFA once in awhile.
I've read more than a few things and knew I was reading a corporate blow hole, and not a genuine opinon.
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?
What is the use of a blog, period? Does anybody actually read these damn things?
Yeah, freedom of speech can be a real pain, can't it.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I'd be sympathetic too if I found a few extra dollars deposited into my bank account... *coughs* Ahem.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's like a collage. The material within a collage comes from elsewhere and is "simply" pasted in, yet the overall effect is something greater than the mechanically reproduced parts. The problem here seems to be that Walmart are choosing the texts more than the bloggers, and with the bloggers slapping in great slabs of Walmart PR copy, there isn't a whole lot to differentiate these blogs from Walmart propaganda.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic formula that can give us a 100% definitive answer about whether a blog is just propaganda or an interesting collation of texts gleaned from elsewhere. You have to look at them, read them, and decide for yourself.
Bloggers update faster than newspapers and TV news that received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text.
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make install -not war
Some people see a campaign donation and just assume corruption or a buyoff. What if the blog/politician/whatever already agrees with the other party?
Now, that's not so corrupt.
Wal-Mart giving stuff to already pro-Wal-Mart (or more likely anti-anti-Wal-Mart) blogs is no big deal. Wal-Mart buying actual blog support would be a big deal.
If the Democratic Party gives a press release to a liberal blog to use, is that a big deal? I wouldn't think so.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I couldn't agree more.
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?
Works for FoxNews.
So you'd rather some latte-quaffing ponce told us about their day using OSX and riding around on an eco-friendly scooter before meeting their pseudo-intellectual friends to discuss the latest birkenstocks over a tofu & soy meal? I only read one blog - "Ms Kitka's Kitkast". And the only reason I visit that is in the slim hope that one day she will get her kit off and show me the goods. She really is a naughty little minx.
PS: Have blogs ever been useful?
I don't think we get to determine which blogs are useful and which blogs aren't, except in a personal sense. Sure, it might be nice to pretend to be the god of bloggers and smite the useless ones (and believe me, your smiting hand would get pretty tired), but in reality, the worth of a blog can only be objectively determined by it's creator. Our only control is binary: read or don't read.
If Walmart has a posse, then good for Walmart. I'm certainly not a fan, and it does bother me that some people are, but that's their choice. Until we get rid of this whole "free speech" thing, we're stuck with it.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Seriously, who actually bothers reading these PR mouthpiece blogs? In fact, who bothers reading most of these worthless "me-too" meme-reposting blogs too? I will never fathom how these sorts of things get any hits to start with, but the fact that they must be getting return hits (or no one would notice these things, right? ... right?) boggles my mind.
haha, my verification word is "advert." How a propos.
While there will always be companies trying to infiltrate blogs as a mouthpiece, this takes a sustained effort, the expenditure of resources and a coordinated effort for it to be successful in anything but the short term. Most companies aren't good on sustained efforts with questionable benefits and blogging is one activity that has dubious results in effecting the bottom line. Companies keep business by keeping their customers happy and there are limits to the effectiveness of spin control and FUD. RIM used a lot of blog astroturfing against NTP and still ended up paying $620 million dollars, which was $162 million more than than if they had settled a year before.
The real question is "What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?"
"Wal-Mart was found out to be exploiting the US taxpayer by not providing adequate health benefits to its employees."
All they were found to be doing was paying the workers for the work they do. This does not exploit workers or taxpayers. It is pretty outrageous to expect a company to pay EVERY low-value low-skill worker enough to meet some arbitrary high standard of income, whether or not the worker earns it...and most importantly (in your line of having companies give away money logic) whether or not their lifestyle needs it.
A single mother of three working the register might need a health plan, but a teenager working the register won't (because their family has it already). In your "pay them according to demands, not their work" world, what do you do? Pay the single mother some high amount she never earned, while also overpaying the teenager so they have equal pay? Or have a pay scale based on lifestyle instead of work (so a single mother earns much more than a teenager)?
Taxpayers subsidize Wal*Mart with $0 money. It is not the taxpayer's fault that welfare medical money is wasted, and it is not the taxpayer's fault when someone is a lousy worker is too lazy to earn more. Wal-Mart should not be blamed for paying everyone the worth of the work.
If you build it, they will come...
What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?
The use of a blog is the same as it ever was: if an individual has something valuable to say, we listen; if not, not.
PR departments have invaded every form of communication that has been developed. They will continue to do so. All we can do is be selective about who we listen to.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I gather there's a guy by the name of CmdrTaco whose blog has a pretty impressive readership. Always some interesting reader commentary following every article, too... I'd link to it, but I forget the url.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What is the use of slashdot if submitters are just going to copy sentences and sentiments FTA?"
I meta-moderate because I care.
This is great. The New York Times along with most of the press don't like blogs. So they write about bloggers that post positive material about Walmart. Walmart which is one of the current targets of dislike by many in the online community. And what are these evil bloggers doing? Posting emails sent to them by Walmart.
If a blogger was posting emails sent to them by Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, Whole Foods, Ben and Jerry's, or Greenpeace would it get any attention? Would they have any less credibility?
I rarely shop at Walmart not because they are EVIL but because I don't like a lot of what they carry and the lines and parking are just not worth it. Yes there are other stores that provide better service, products, and or selections for not much more money. Those stores seem to be doing fine in my city.
This is a great piece of spin and it looks as if many have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?"
And you're asking this on slashdot?
This story is most significant as Washington DC decides whether to protect the free speech of bloggers, as the First Amendment requires, as completely as it protects the rights of mass media, like cable TV news. The mass media lobbies DC with scare stories about corporations paying bloggers to publish pure PR, as opposed to the "responsible, independent, researched journalism" from the mass media that the law currently protects. The idea is to protect a privileged class of journalists, the corporate mass media, but not the unprivileged interactive media, like bloggers.
Of course, the corporate media's entire business model is taking corporate money and publishing their PR, even if carefully cooked to provide harmless (or occasionally stress-releasing) corporate PR.
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make install -not war
But this post is really an excuse for a triva lesson: everybody's seen Press Releases, which are phony news articles that people put out in the hopes that lazy newspaper editors will print them unchanged. Back when most newspapers were published with hot type, press releases were often distributed as pre-typeset pieces of lead that papers could just stick on their presses. The pre-typeset articles were big curved pieces of metal that looked like something you'd use to make boiler. Hence the term "boilerplate".
"What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?" Says Zonk as he cuts and pastes....
Anyone familiar with the American media knows that our "journalists" spend a lot more time recounting what they've picked up off the wire services and corporate/government press releases than they do actually attempting to enlighten the public . Why anyone would expect bloggers to be any less lazy and worthless than CNN, Fox News, MSNBC or most newspapers is beyond me.
Blogging, as with many concepts, sounds great in theory. Unfettered information and opinions blasting across the 'net and all that. However, in practice, as with most other forms of journalism it just means a bunch of lazy people passing off information from others. Whether it is from WalMart or the New York Times hardly matters. And yes (speaking as a recovering journalist), I count blogging as journalism. It's just the modern equivalent of Poor Richard's Almanac. Unfortunately, most bloggers (and modern journalists) can't compare with Ben Franklin. Of course, if he was still around and was a blogger, I can only imagine the lack of restraints (having to set type tended to make people actually think about what they were writing before they printed it) would mean his blog would be crap too.
Who actually reads corporate blogs anyway? The whole point of blogs being interesting, if they are personal blogs, is that the writing is interesting and has intrinsic value. It's not like TV where it is one site of a fixed number, there's millions of blogs out there and if the readers don't want to read it, they won't. I know I wouldn't waste my personal time trying to hunt through a corporate-sponsored blog looking for truth about anything.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Free speech is great, and a skeptical reader is more informed because of it. The trouble with this tendency is that it blurs the line between personal speech and advertising. As many others have pointed out, traditional media outlets have parroted press releases for many years.
:)
This conflicts with all the recent trumpeting of blogs as a great independent media watchdog and personal voice, much of which has been done by traditional media outlets perhaps uncomfortable with their mouthpiece position. Kinda blows that out of the water, doesn't it?
Here's a wicked idea: Automated plagiarism detection systems are commonplace in academia now. What if some of the larger blogging services started highlighting sentences or phrases that appeared on someone else's blog earlier? A shared database between LJ and Blogspot and the rest, with feeds from a few dozen top tech websites, would simplify the whole mess. Resource-intensive? Yes, but not nearly so much as every user running their own crawler-comparator.
Text posted on the internet might not be completely legitimate or factual.
Film at 11.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Of course we don't consider ourselves a "blog" so whatever, more like a space news thing. Sometimes cut and paste is good, especially when one doesn't want to place personal opinions on the piece.
By the way we have a great article up right now at http://www.foxcheck.org/ with a legal and free mp3 from Big Head Todd and the Monsters for the upcoming Yuris Night world space party.
Ahead of the curve well?.. maybe.. cool? We think so. :)
Check it out if you want to, its straight from a great source at JPL :)
Peace,
D
p.s.: yes i still love /. :)
Isn't this what
This is news?
The whole point of unregulated speech is that people are free to abuse it. Some will be trolls, some will be corporate shills, some will be flat-out wackos, and almost all of them will be biased as hell. For all the crap some Slashdotters like to talk about bloggers being 'journalists', there's no set of standards or ethics that bloggers are required -- or even expected -- to obey.
When people decide to turn off their critical thinking skills and just accept whatever they read on some blog they've never seen before, they're stupid. End of story. Making a big deal out of the fact that bloggers don't self-organize into an ethical and reliable news system is equally stupid. Both these principles fall on the 'obvious' scale somewhere near, "hey look: air."
What news media isn't like that? If a PR is giving you the news, it's going to be biased. It is a PR's job to be biased and get the image they want out. If the PR gives a completed story to a journalist/blogger/local idiot, the journo/whatever will report what the PR said as fact, not as biased garbage. Surprised? You shouldn't be...
Atrios rightly points out that many many newspapers often pick up press releases and run them almost un-edited as content, and that it's been going on for a long time. The difference is that on the web such practices are much more easily exposed. "Much ado about nothing" indeed.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
If that's "good PR", Wal-Mart needs to hire better PR folks to write material that is actually believable.
Of course, the guy who put up the Wal-Mart PR also likes to threaten lawsuits for anyone using 'his material'. Evidently, those corporate PR posts are copyrighted, dammit!
Sounds like natural evolution to me. Blogs have attracted enough attention by the corps to get noticed, now we'll see blogs with categorization and restrictions over the next several months. It'll be interesting to look back at this next year to see how our definition of "Blog" has changed.
WARNING: Information you read on the Net may be untrustworthy. Film at 11.
Like the saying goes, "I read it on usenet, so it must be true." Just s/usenet/the world wide web/ and we're done.
How is this sort of thing news?
Damn. I wish I had some mod points today. I understand that there are some news-oriented blogs (like /., engadget, etc.) that are relatively useful, but I would hazard that a vast vast majority of blogspot or myspace types are just normal people using them as whining platforms and their little grabble for the spotlight/attention. Also, copy/pasting content from other blogs/sites does not a good writer make. Nor does it make you any more useful.
If you need a vent-journal, write it down. You're going to feel like an idiot when your kids are mining "the old internet" for your crybaby rants.
We all know that "journalists" do this all the time.
A cliche from an old movie:
- The difference between a Journalist and a Reporter is that a journalist writes a story, a reporter simply reports what he sees.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
One of the main members of the traditional "OMG Bloggorz!" media which hires editors for the sole purpose of making sure they deleted the "For Immediate Release - Office of the Press Secretary" off of every story.
Wal-Mart has a lot of employees (1.7 Million). It is a BIG company. Everything else follows from there.
The full-timers do have insurance. But there many are part-timers who do not, just like many other businesses. Seems to me, giving instructions for finding free clinics is more of a public service for those employees who need it than an exploitive scheme. Do other companies tell their non-covered employees about free clinics?
You might as well say Poor people exploit the taxpayer by using government services .
Exploiting the US Taxpayer Did you know that Wal-Mart has 1500 International stores (3600 US)? Does Wal-Mart exploite the taxpayes of these other countries too?
How does Wal-Mart compare to any large employer? How much health care does McDonalds provide for part-time employees? How about Starbucks - they have lots of part-timers.
I don't know what all this hatred of WMT is, of late. What's the difference between a valid business model and an evil scheme? I guess it has to do with how big you are. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to the fact that WMT has money and other people want to get at it because it is there.
Let's check that last one... Is Wal-Mart making "obscene" amounts of money? WMT
Profit margin: 3.6% - Doesn't look obscene to me, Sure it is billions of dollars. MCD makes 12.7% and so does PEP. TGT (Target) makes 4.58% - maybe they exploit their workers even more to squeeze that extra 1% profit out of them.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
With a BLOG, there's an expectation of significant innovation in content that expresses the views of those posting it. Slashdot, like Google News, is expected to be a collection of links with little to no original content (except, for slashdot, in the discussion areas).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It's so very amusing that the "evil puppetmaster" is Walmart. As opposed to the limitless PR releases pasted into blogs daily from sources like MoveOn.gor and others. Btw, Walmart represents billions in additional (uncontrolled) union dues. It is an enormous target and given the enthusiasm by unions to increase their funds, any thing written in any regard to Walmart has zero credibility.
Btw, in U.S. Unions do not have to report how they spend any money unless a single payment exceeds $1MM including political contributions. Whereas corporations and individuals must report any political contribution and including source (and employer if it's a personal amount). The result is that California is headed for an epic catastrophic failure of it's economy as the massive number of Union negotiated retirement and medical benefits become available to the massive number of public sector workers. Amusingly, the organizations Calpers an Calstars who are responsbile, in part, for ensuring that monies are available for those benefits are selectively investing in "socially progressive" companies including Al Gore's cable company and Sean "Puffy" Combes. These are companies that NO other major investment firm rates as a "buy". So, you ask, what has this to do with anything?
We need union reform and morons who post derogatory commentary about non union shops like Walmart are just mouth pieces for these organizations.
Union: an enitity which you pay to tell you what your opinion is.
~ Wizardry Dragon
"Companies of all stripes are using blogs to help shape public opinion."
I understand companies wanting to make people like them, but I'm confused as to how/why public opinion is the driving force behind everything that happens in America today.
[Begin slightly off topic]
During an interview I saw this weekend, a very high ranking officer involved in the efforts in Iraq was asked, "Why do you think our strategy is good, but 67% of Americans think it's bad?" I can't believe that a serious journalist is proposing that something as important as military exercises should be run by counting noses, rather than letting people who have expertise in an area determine the best course of action. If I'm sick, I'm not going to poll my relatives and friends; I'm going to go to a doctor!
[End slightly off topic]
While I don't agree with everything that President Bush has done, I respect that he tends to make a decision that he can support, and go with it. President Clinton mostly ran the administration via poll.
[Sorry, NOW end slightly off topic]
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. -- Sir Winston Churchill
Do you believe everything you read on the Internet? Are blogs your new guides to truth? If so, you might need to be concerned about this... otherwise, just yawn and go on with your daily life. People mimick what they see all the time, either by copying it directly or repeating it in whole, part or kind from memory. Do you think that pop bands become popular purely based on their talent? Of course not it's marketing. Do you think that every political blog ever written has been a well thought out independant piece of writing? Of course not. Judge each blog on its merits. If the ideas are true then it doesn't matter if a Walmart PR guy wrote them or if a Joe Johnson in Multonomica, Missouri was inspired to wax poetic about his favorite store and their rock bottom prices.
So let's see.... If we agree with you, we have an opinion. If we don't agree, we are shills.
If a reputable newspaper prints (a comment) that reveals the writer not having a glue about Google's products or business model, this is embarrassing. If the writer then claims a technology that is pre-Google (cookie based tracking) as being new and promising, that is shameful. If the writer further asserts the paper he comments in is actually using these "new" advertising methods, it is laughable.
If the Financial times can pull off this triple embarrassment of feeding their readers grossly false information, touting an already obsolete technology as new and wasting their own money on it, then the standards are not very high for the blogosphere.
These kinds of experiences, where press organs write a bout a subject I believe to be knowledgeable and I have to learn that it is total nonsense that is published. I always makes me wonder what trust I can have in any other reporting.No wonder this particular publication is having trouble making a profit. They deserve it!
Furthermore, what is the difference between bloggers and major news outlets?
What's wrong with posting verbatim press releases if it's labeled as a press release ?
See Computing News for an example:http://computingnews.com
Free Web based FTP
Wasn't it the NYT which during the run up to the US invasion of Iraq was basically reprinting verbatim rumours and lies spoonn fed them by the neocons in the Bush Administration?
This is just a double-header for these guys, a chance to attack 2 enemies at once, bloggers, and Walmart.
They don't like bloggers for the obvious reasons, and they don't like Walmart for at least 2: Cause the NYT is both neocon, and old-guard liberal, with sympathies to the anti-china crowd (where Walmart does most of its procuring) and the labor unions, which hate Walmart for the obvious reasons.
Zonk, I can think of many other uses for a blog.
I, for one, only put my Slashbot point of view in my blog. No no no, the editors don't tell me what to put in it. Rather, I copy from astroturfers here.
...
I for one, think that Wal*Mart is evil, as is Microsoft, people who are paid for a living, commercial software development, and software patents. Google is evil for raising the average salary of software engineers, and for stealing all of the good ones. How will my dogfood website ever get off the ground now?
Anyway, you can read all about it in my blog, which is NOT Technology Trends by Roland Piqpaille, because he is also evil, as is capitalism, and every American citizen, who are also bad people.
I for one will be boycotting every American business and product possible, from the comfort of my office in San Diego, with my Dell laptop and my Coca Cola, while posting on Slashdot, an American site.
You get the idea. These aren't my ideas, but, rather what the shills who post here sound like (you don't need corporate backing to be a shill or a sellout, but the benefits package is a lot better)
Slashdot is simply reposting someone's opinion... if someone emails you an opinion, and you repost it, you are saying you agree with that person's opinion. And you are giving them a chance to publicize their own words. Which is important because the average blogger spins everything they post.
"Welcome to the new economy. Medical or law degree? No? Then you are low-value. No insurance. No promotions. No home. No family. No car. No savings. No retirement. Those things are only for the "high-value" people."
You mean "imaginary economy". In the real economy (the one that exists now and won't change) 70-80% have cars, insurance, promotions, family, and more. Only a small percent of these have medical or law degrees.
"Taxpayers subsidize Wal*Mart with $0 money.BZZZT. I'm sorry."
Caught you in a lie. The amount of taxpayer subsidies to Wal-Mart is $0. There might be taxpayer subsidies to their individual workers, but that is because of a combination of a very wasteful government welfare policy AND the stupid lifestyle choices of the workers. Wal-Mart is entirely blameless in this: they've already paid the workers. What the workers end up doing with the money (or not doing) is entirely the worker's responsibility.
I Think it's bloggers jobs to stop promoting capitalist whores like Walmart from getting ahead. Read it here: http://www.semanticparanoia.com/
Ignoring one possible reason for that, which is that you simply attribute more validity and hence a more thought-out perspective to one political viewpoint than the other...
Let's do some pretend analysis with some inaccurate labels (right and left) and a healthy dose of generalization.
Say that the group of Slashdot posters is made up of:
80% "left-wingers"
20% "right-wingers"
Assuming lefts and rights come up with relatively proportional numbers of insightful posts, you are going to see a whole lot more overrated comments by lefties. This is because of the fact that most moderaters are left-leaning as well, which means that you'll find that only the best right-wing comments are modded up, while the standards for left-wingers are lower. The end result will be that, based on a survey of modded-up comments, you'll tend to see many more badly-thought-out-yet-modded-up liberal comments than conservative ones.
The end result is, conservatives appear to be the intelligent minority, when really their bullshit is just screened better.
The guy extensively quoted in the NYT piece chimes in with his two cents here - good reading IF you want to hear the their side of the story.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
It's a HUGE corporation. Are there instances where some thigns have happened that were not legal? In one of the largest corporations on the planet? Sure. And we do what we usually do when someone in some office in a corporation screws up: We fine them.
What I sympathize with Wal-Mart about is that it gets a bad rap as a "bad employer". Common metrics of Wal-Mart being a "bad employer" are that "X number of Wal-Mart employees don't have health insurance, the largest number of any employer in the state." Well no shit, when you employ 3 times as many people, you have a lot more people who don't have health insurance. It's a BS statistic. Or "Wal-Mart hires illegal workers". Right - because there arn't any local businesses who hire workers and pay them cash, immigrants or otherwise.
What people do NOT mention, however, is that people who work at WalMart have better pay and benefits than people who work at the mom-and-pop shops WalMart tends to put out of business. Do you think the people working for the local independent grocer get health insurance? The local hardware store? Extremely unlikely they get benefits or are paid more than marginally above the minimum wage.
WalMart pays its employees more than those employees would be paid doing similar jobs for competing retailers, and it sells products for less than competing retailers charge.
Walmart creates economic efficiency. It allows consumers to have more stuff for the same price. It allows some employees to buy more stuff than they could buy at other jobs. The only people who lose are the individual small store owners who can't compete with WalMart. Which is fine with me. Why should I pay more for goods simply because YOU want to own a store?
I'm not saying WalMart isn't a little evil. It's a corporation, so it's probably at least a little evil. But it's less evil than not having WalMart. When someone says "Don't shop at WalMart, it's evil!" what they're really saying is "Pay more to shop at stores that have even worse employee wages and benefits than WalMart does." or "Pay more to shop at stores that force their employees to support cushy jobs for union leaders."
paintball
"Sure, because it isn't like Walmart management is going to reduce their multi-million dollar salaries, their enormous benefits package, and their huge profit margins just to give their employees a fair deal. "
The employees already have a fair deal.
"In any case, it isn't their choice to unionize or not; that's up to the employees"
Nothing is stopping Wal-Mart workers from giving whatever money they want to unions. What is being prevented right now the trick whereby all Wal-Mart workers are forced to belong to the union whether or not it is in the worker's interest.
"Seriously; this is Walmart we're talking about. IBM executives make a butt-load of money, but their employees do pretty well, too."
As do Wal-Mart employees for the jobs and skills they have. You are comparing high-wage college educated technical jobs to low-value low-skill jobs. Each understandably draws different pay levels. Both IBM and Wal-Mart employees do pretty well for the work they do and the skills they have. I think you are also forgetting that there are many Wal-Mart workers with high-value skills that do earn a lot. The company is not all mindless cashier and boxboy grunts.
"The disparity between the Walmart benefits for the executives and the employees is so huge"
The executives are employees, too. However, there are different wage levels for different work and skills: as there should be. If the value of the work has a huge difference, the wage should too.
"it isn't anything but absurd."
It is quite understandable that someone with a lot of valuable skill gets paid a lot more than someone who barely has any skills at all (but can shove boxes across a stock room). Sam Walton worked on both ends of it, and he wasn't as stupid as you to assert that stockboys (and he was one) deserve to be paid much more than a low-value starter job like that is worth. It would be absurd to pay these jobs more or less than they are worth.
On this past Saturday night, I posted a blurb about this story, which I knew was going to appear shortly in the Times. http://mu-warrior.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-york-ti mes-and-great-wal-mart.html
I'm wondering why the editors didn't allow it on the board.
Is there some sort of ideological bias around here?