Law & Society Blog

There is an article in the NY Times today (subscription required), describing the way Wal-Mart has been using bloggers in their PR efforts. Here is a taste:

Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. “All across the country, newspaper editorial boards - no great friends of business - are ripping the bills,” he wrote.

It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.

Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell’s Jan. 20 posting - and others from different days - are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart’s public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.

There are obvious issues, of course. Wal-Mart says it doesn’t pay bloggers, but apparently the lines Wal-Mart is feeding the bloggers aren’t attributed to Wal-Mart by the bloggers, either. It makes you realize that in the unregulated blogsphere there does seem to be one rule: attribute content to its source. And it is being broken here.

There is another aspect to it that is interesting from a law & society perspective: Wal-Mart says it uses bloggers in an “overall effort to tell our story.” Telling a story is a good and fair thing. Manipulating the masses isn’t, of course. The acceptability of such topoi as “narrative” and “story” where some time ago we might have expected “facts” or “view” shows to what extent relativism and the adversarial approach to truth has entered American folklore.

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