Big NYTimes story today on Walmart's outreach to bloggers via Edelman PR (the new home of Steve Rubel).  Apparently some of  the bloggers reposted emails from Walmart PR without disclosure or attribution.  Hay is being made.

As a number of people have pointed out, however, bloggers are far from the first people in media to do this.  (Dan Gilmor has a good overview of the controversy.)  People say all the time that Mainstream Media cover various corporations or government initiatives as if they were just reproducing press releases.  What about the Video News Releases, stories planted in the Iraqi press, or a quarter million dollars for favorable coverage of No Child Left Behind? 

To be fair, the political left did drop the ball in an ugly way when lefty bloggers claimed that Walmart was being intentionally racist when its movie recommendation engine connected some African American films and Planet of the Apes.  It turned out that the recommendation engine was mapping a large number of unrelated films together, including Power Puff Girls, Home Alone and some films about African American history.As Gilmor and others point out, though, the problem isn't Walmart's (or rather Edleman's) actions here.  They appear to have done a good job pitching the bloggers, delivering short bits of info with links, warning them (according to the NYTimes story above) not to copy and paste the emails after it appeared to be happening (what a nightmare for them!).  Regardless of the moral implications of doing PR for Walmart in general, the fault in this scandal seems to lie with the bloggers who failed to heed requests to use the pitches for inspiration - not copy.

Interestingly, within weeks of Edleman's much celebrated hiring of the #1 blogger in the blogosphere (at least according to Technorati Favorites) , Steve Rubel doesn't seem to be saying anything about the blogospheric troubles.  Here's what the head of Edleman had to say about it.

I'll be tagging this story into my archive of resources on pitching bloggers for sure.