THE TRUTH ABOUT WAL-MART

Thanks to Mark Lane at FlaBlog for the heads up about this obvious attempt to intimidate the media.

Seems as though Pensacola News Journal columnist Mark O'Brien wrote a piece last month noting that while he --- as many of us --- enjoy the usually lower prices found at Wal-Mart, there is a downside.

Mark discovered some interesting facts from the current best selling book The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Such as the fact that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees are in a Georgia health care programme which costs taxpayers there nearly $10 million a year. And the fact that a New York Times report found that 31 percent of the patients at a North Carolina hospital were Wal-Mart employees on Medicaid.

Mark's boss, Executive Editor Randy Hammer, noted that the point of the column was actually to show that Pensacola was becoming a Wal-Mart kind of town, "cheap and comfy on the surface, lots of unhappiness and hidden costs underneath."

Well, some in Wal-Mart management didn't like Mr. O'Brien's writing, and asked the News Journal to remove it's racks from it's stores and advised that it would no longer sell the newspaper. Hammer wrote that the area manager informed him that "...if I fired Mark, we could talk about continuing to sell the newspaper at his stores."

I like Hammer's closing remarks in his column which ran in Sunday's edition:

When we stop listening to people on the other side of the fence, when we try to silence and even punish people for thinking differently than we do and raising facts and figures we don't like, well, we won't be red, white and blue anymore.
That's why Mark still has a job and you can't buy a Pensacola News Journal at Wal-Mart anymore.

Randy Hammer, I4J salutes you!