Friday, September 08, 2006

Wal-Mart War   [John J. Miller]

The NYT desperately would like to think that when conservatives defend Wal-Mart from the enemies of capitalism, it's because Wal-Mart has bought them off. You know, because in ordinary circumstances free marketeers would support the store's demonization by the labor-backed groups that want to unionize its workers or regulate it out of existence. In today's edition, the ever-watchful Times reveals that "top policy analysists" at "prominent conservative research groups ... have consistently failed to disclose a tie to the giant discount retailer: financing from the Walton Family Foundation." (Well, at least we can rest easy about the bottom policy analysts at obscure conservative research groups, who apparently disclose all.) And this "raises questions about what the research groups should disclose to newspaper editors, reporters or government officials." Tellingly, the Times can't locate a single newspaper editor, reporter, or government official who actually raises such a question. It quotes precisely one person from this category—a deputy editor at the Miami Herald—and he seems appropriately unperturbed by the fact that his paper ran an op-ed by someone whose non-profit employer received a tiny sliver of its overall budget from the Walton Foundation. The question-raisers who are quoted are either unionists, leftists, or both. What we have here is the very definition of a phony controversy.

09/08 05:55 AMShare