Mainstream Media Mum on Wal-Mart Scoop

TBM is very proud today to have published Marc Gunther's scoop about Wal-Mart's plans to develop a "sustainability index," which will measure the environmental impact of everything the retail giant sells. It's a move that could well shape the future of retail, not just in this country but through much of the developed world and, as Gunther points out, it raises some provocative questions about Wal-Mart's (WMT) role as a kind of pseudo-regulator.

Not surprisingly, environmental blogs (like Grist and Treehugger) have picked up the story, as well as social media sites and aggregators like the Huffington Post. So far, though, no large mainstream news organization is linking to the TBM story—not the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or any daily paper, or big TV network, or national magazine. (Update: On Wednesday morning, a Wall Street Journal blog linked to our story.)

Why not? 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. Not that the story itself is damaging; if anything, it highlights the company's world-beating scope and social ambition. Wal-Mart set its schedule, and apparently intends to enforce it on a compliant business press corps. It's a worthwhile reminder that the difference between traditional journalism and Web/blog journalism is not—as is so often portrayed—merely technological. It's also a difference in relationship to official news sources; mainstream media has an institutional tendency not to ruffle feathers, so as to maintain future access. In this case, it's hard to see how that practice serves readers.