Following the New Yorker article at the beginning of the week which completely exposed Wal-Mart's public relations campaign as a sham and Lee Scott's disastrous interviews in which he admitted defeat in NYC and referred to himself as an 'angel,' Wal-Mart has decided to take down its ill-advised paidcritics.com website. Wal-Mart's attack website, which was the brainchild of soon-to-be-unemployed Leslie Dach and some crazy, right-wing Bush and Big Tobacco operatives, was right out of Karl Rove's playbook. That's why we responded in-kind with a tongue and cheek website called www.ABunchOfGreedyRightWingLiarsWhoWorkForWalMart.com.
Click here for the AP article on the suspension of paidcritics.com, and keep reading for a statement attributable to a rather snarky Chris Kofinis, Communications Director for WakeUpWalMart.com:
“We are shocked and dismayed that Wal-Mart is shutting down paidcritics.com. We have greatly enjoyed the incredibly hard work of Brian (we don’t know his last name) who worked endless hours for Edelman’s “smear and slime” machine by posting on paidcritics.com. Hopefully Brian won’t lose his ‘huge chunk’ of Edelman’s $10 million PR contract.Then again, given the amazing collapse of Wal-Mart’s public image, we wonder if it’s really fair to blame Brian, Paidcritics.com, Leslie Dach or Edelman. The truth is that Edelman worked really hard coming up with fake grassroots groups (“astroturfing”, as the Edelman PR folks call it).
"I mean, who could forget such Edelman brilliance as a ‘Working Families for Wal-Mart’ group that had no working families or “Walmarting Across America,” a great little fake RV tour bought and paid for by Wal-Mart, and, of course, Paidcritics.com a fake blog whose sole purpose was to hurt the feelings of hard-edged and incredibly handsome/beautiful former campaign workers who now work at WakeUpWalMart.com.As we move forward, since Wal-Mart is so concerned with ‘doing the right thing,’ maybe Wal-Mart will take some of the $10 million it wastes on Edelman, and maybe some its $11.3 billion in profits, and try to salvage its faltering public image by providing more affordable health care and better wages to its 1.39 million employees.
Unfortunately, as Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said over and over again this week, Wal-Mart is all but oblivious to its wrongs. Hopefully, Scott and others at Wal-Mart will realize one thing, we are not paid to criticize Wal-Mart, what we are paid to do is to try as hard as we can everyday to make Wal-Mart a better company, and this country a better place for hard-working families.
In that spirit, we can only hope that Wal-Mart realizes only by working together, both Wal-Mart and us, can we move forward and create the kind of better America all hard-working families deserve.”
Posted by Laura - April 1, 2007 11:07 PM - In The News