So Wal-Mart has established a war room. They’ve hired a whole bunch of people, most of them advisors to presidents and would-be presidents, to run a public-relations marathon to prep up their flagging image. These people have been hired on a continuing basis to do this job. Republicans and Democrats finally united – to make Wal-Mart seem pleasant. You know, with all the money they’re spending on these people and this new strategy, they could just pay their workers a decent wage and overtime, and probably have money left over. But it just seems to go against the corporate mindset to fix a problem like that.
Joe wrote a post about how the recent media scandals should prompt the industry to do something about its problems - though it is unclear how and when they could do this. I’d love to think that the industry will now hire people to fact-check, and more reporters so no one gets to feel like the only way they can do their job is to cheat, and keep the stars of the industry in line so that we can once again have a media whose sole purpose it is to disseminate information to the public. Unfortunately, what I think we’re seeing here is the “Wal-Martization†of the newspaper industry; of the media in general. Most newspapers are owned by big corporations that only seem to care about the bottom line. So, like Wal-Mart, instead of spending the money to fix the problem, what they will do is spend money to mask the problem.
Along with spending all that money getting rid of Judy Miller, the Times should hire a whole bunch of fact checkers and whatever else they need to ensure that this kind of thing stops happening. If they had done that in the first place (maybe after the Jayson Blair scandal), the Judy Miller fiasco might have been prevented. In that same way, Wal-Mart, instead of spending the money they’re going to spend anyway on a bunch of talking heads and spin doctors, could spend the money on their workers, the people who actually deserve it.
I guess my point is that corporations have become obsessed with spinning bad news into good news, and they spend a ton of money doing it. Instead of looking for the root of their problem, and fixing it, they spray perfume at it, and hope it covers up the stink of the garbage beneath. It might be more expensive in the short-term to put together an initiative to fix the problem (in Wal-Mart’s case paying their workers well, and in the case of the newspaper industry, putting safeguards in place to ward off future scandals), but in the long-term such initiatives are often cheaper.
I’m not sure if the newspaper industry will ever change. All I know is if they don’t scandals are going to keep cropping up, and one day, people will stop trusting them altogether. And that would be an awful tragedy.
Kirsten Vala @ November 1, 2005 - 12:52am
Wal-mart probably has their finances figured to the tenth or hundredth of a cent. They shouldn’t be accused of short-sightedness – they could never make every employee happy, but if their unhappiness was not projected to the public then it would effectively disappear. As for Newspapers, I agree that they should ideally make changes before the public trust is jeopardized, but most solutions are so impractical that it seems a heightened sense of public skepticism is the only option. And really, people thinking for themselves could never be a bad thing.
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