PR Firm Convincingly Presents Client As Orwellian Monolith

Guess what? There is outrage in the Blogosphere about Wal-Mart!

In an shockingly dumb and clearly doomed effort to buff the retail giant's image, PR Powerhouse Edelman used one of its front groups (Working Families for Wal-Mart) to financially underwrite an RV trip "visting Wal-Marts Across America" by two basically anonymous bloggers, who, shockingly, found nothing but positive things to say about their corporate benefactors.

Blogger's are angry...dismayed...getting to the bottom of it. Best article in several cited in this post is the Business Week entry. Bottom line, seems as though Wal-Mart itself was paying the bill for this adventure by at most four degrees of separation (bloogers to Working Families to Edelman to WalMart-- the actual chain much shorter, as it is likely the bill stops at WalMar and the buck stops at Edelman).

My question: who would think that two people RV-ing across American with nothing but nice things to say about WalMart were anything but flacks or, at best, profoundly boring?

In any case, our credibility-free culture evolves apace!