USA Today: Wal-Mart’s critics, opening a new front in their war on the retail goliath, are borrowing from actor-director Mel Gibson’s promotional playbook.
Producers of a new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, will show it at about 1,000 churches, synagogues and religious sites nationwide on Nov. 13 in a bid to force changes in Wal-Mart’s employment and other practices.
The film, by the director of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, comes as Wal-Mart mounts a new effort to polish its battered image. The movie is part of a broader campaign by a disparate group of critics who now include ministers asserting Wal-Mart’s tactics are a moral as well as economic issue.
Producer Robert Greenwald hopes for the same success Gibson had last year building grass-roots support through churches for his blockbuster, The Passion of the Christ.
The Wal-Mart film features interviews with company employees, small-business owners, teachers and others who sharply criticize it with charges of low wages, skimpy health benefits and a poor environmental record.
“Those are moral questions,” Greenwald said Wednesday. “They’re questions of who we are as people, who we are as a country.”
Consumers may be receptive. Moral values ranked No. 4 among top non-economic worries in a Gallup Poll this month.
