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Walmart to the Huffington Post: You're Dead to Us

Walmart is sick and tired of The Huffington Post publishing negative stories about them.

Walmart is sick and tired of The Huffington Post publishing negative stories about them, so they've decided the news site will just get the silent treatment from now on. The nation's biggest retailer started spitting fire last week after HuffPost published a story about denying its lowpaid workers health care and burned the bridge completely on Monday by reaffirming its commitment to keep Arianna Huffington and her minions at arms length.

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In the words of David Tovar, Walmart's vice president of communications, "We have made a business decision not to participate in Huffington Post articles going forward due to the one-sided reporting and unfair and unbalanced editorial decisions made by Huffington Post reporters and editors." (Disclosure: I worked as an editor on the social news team at HuffPost from 2009 to 2010.)

To be fair — or at least try — Walmart has had a pretty rough year in terms of media coverage. It started out in January with continued analysis of its epic battle against sexual discrimination accusations as well as a new lawsuit from some 50,000 women in Texas who accuse the big box store of being sexist. Then there's the on-going criminal investigation into allegations of systemic bribery in Mexico, and the very sad story of the 73-year-old woman who got fired after a customer attacked her.

Let's not forget the weird stories, like the couple who tied up their kids and left them in a Walmart parking lot. Or did you hear the one about the woman who got stuck on a Walmart toilet for an hour after getting Superglued to the seat? What about the pork supplier caught ripping the testicles off of baby pigs without any anesthetic? Those are all Huffington Post links, by the way. I also found at least one positive story about Walmart making Rosalind Brewer the first black female CEO of Sam's Club. The picture is otherwise pretty grim over there.

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It's hard to say whether HuffPost's library of negative Walmart stories exist because HuffPost hates Walmart or because Walmart simply does things that warrant such muckraking. The Huffington Post's executive business editor Peter Goodman, who's overseen much of the site's reporting on Walmart, insists it's the latter. "We plead guilty to singling out the nation's single largest private employer for significant coverage," he says. "We stand by our work."

It doesn't sound like Goodman really likes Walmart, though, when he describes the company as "an employer that relies on the federal government handing out food stamps and it has been enormously successful at satisfying consumer demand for cheap products, and it's worth scrutinizing what are the social costs of those cheap products." (No mention, by the way, of HuffPost's own aggregation and usage of people's work without compensation.)

Walmart would obviously have you believe that HuffPost has some sort of vendetta out against them. Walmart says the stories are "riddled with inaccuracies," and despite Walmart's press team working hard to get HuffPost reporters to say nice things, HuffPost just continues to say mean things. They can't understand why HuffPost would write so many stories about the massive, nationwide strikes at Walmart stores on Black Friday instead of covering the store's great sales that day. Walmart is especially upset that HuffPost has a landing page for all of their stories but not one for their competitors. (Fun fact: HuffPost does have landing pages for Walmart's competitors, though they look a little bit different.)

To put things bluntly: If Walmart really wanted The Huffington Post, the 21st most popular web site in the country, to be nicer to them, the silent treatment hardly seems like the best option--and it only serves to highlight the long list of negative stories about Walmart this year.

Then again, maybe this is just a good opportunity for Walmart to expand their business yet again and start their own news website. When it comes to compensating writers, it probably can't do much worse than HuffPost.