The compliant business press

James Ledbetter, the editor of The Big Money, writes Tuesday about how one of the site’s reporter’s broke a big story on Wal-Mart Stores Inc., but that the major business media have yet to follow — for a reason.

Ledbetter writes, “There may be a variety of reasons, but I suspect the main one is that Wal-Mart itself has yet to make an official announcement. The company has planned to officially release the information on Thursday, and in recent days has granted interviews to a few journalists who agreed to embargo the information until Thursday.

“Gunther, it should be said, did not violate the embargo, since he never agreed to a Wal-Mart interview in the first place. Rather, he assembled his story by interviewing the wide network of people who are working with Wal-Mart on this massive undertaking.

“The situation puts a new wrinkle on an old journalistic query: What’s the point of upholding an embargo if thousands of people have already read the news? It can’t be, in this case, any concern that the facts in Gunther’s story are wildly wrong. Neither do I anticipate that places like the Times and the Journal are going to have extraordinary perspective on this piece that’s lacking in Gunther’s story; there is no journalist in America who knows more about corporate sustainability efforts than Gunther.

“No, I think the only purpose now served by maintaining the embargo is to avoid pissing off Wal-Mart.”

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