Community Leaders And Analysts Respond To Wal-Mart And Andrew Young

For Immediate Release
Monday, August 21, 2006

Washington, D.C. - Former Wal-Mart spokesman Andrew Young touched off a national firestorm with his recent derogatory comments about Jewish, Asian and Arab business owners. Wal-Mart’s latest public relations crisis, which coincides with image guru Leslie Dach’s first week on the job, is yet another setback for the retail giant’s efforts to expand into urban areas and build relationships with minority leaders. Below is a sampling of the widespread media coverage of the controversy.

• ABC World News: “Wal-Mart Watch circulated and publicized Young’s comments. By Thursday night, Young had apologized and resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart.” [Tapper, Wilson & Herman, 8/18/06]

• Financial Times: “A drive by Wal-Mart, the largest US retailer, to mobilise political support among America’s black and Latino leaders has suffered a spectacular setback with the resignation of Andrew Young, its most high-profile advocate, over racially charged remarks.” [Birchall, 8/19/06]

• Washington Post: “Labor and minority groups immediately denounced the statements. Wal-Mart Watch, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union, called his comments ‘insulting and demeaning.’” [Mui & Joyce, 8/19/06]

• Chicago Tribune: “Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it did not ask for Young to step down, but it did not stand in his way when he did. After all, what does it profit an international mega-corporation to hire a liberal feel-good front man if he makes people feel bad? … I don’t expect anyone to be nominating Young for an NAACP Image Award this year, although he might be a contender for the Mel Gibson Sensitivity Prize.” [Page, 8/20/06]

• Richmond Times-Dispatch: “When Wal-Mart looks down on you from its perch on the moral high ground, you’ve taken a serious fall… But King wouldn’t have been pleased with Young’s decision to assist Wal-Mart in its much-needed image makeover. Wal-Mart employees have complained of low wages, unaffordable health care, sexism and unpaid overtime. If King were alive today, he’d picket this company. That Wal-Mart would end up throwing Young under the bus is beyond ironic.” [Williams, 8/21/06]

• New York Times: “‘My guess is that Andy was trying so hard to run a good race on a questionable horse that he stumbled off track with his unfortunate remarks,’ said the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a longtime associate of Mr. Young. Tom Houck, an Atlantan who worked for the King family, said, ‘I talked to him today and I said, Andy, you sleep with snakes, you’re going to get bitten by them.’” [Dewan & Barbaro, 8/19/06]

• Los Angeles Times: “‘Paid Wal-Mart spokesman Andrew Young’s racist comments are not only an affront to the religious and ethnic groups he attacked, but to the growing multiracial movement in Los Angeles and other cities that has a starkly different vision than Young and Wal-Mart’s any job is a good job mantra,’ said Danny Feingold, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.” [Goldman, 8/18/06]

• ABC World News: “Andrew Young was hired to help Wal-Mart with public relations. The former lieutenant for Martin Luther King was to be an asset as Wal-Mart expands into minority and urban areas… But with this incident, Wal-Mart finds itself in a spot no company wants to be in, needing a PR campaign to defend its PR campaign.” [Tapper, 8/18/06]

• CNBC Closing Bell: “Wal-Mart’s PR program has become the story over the last year. So what you have now is an entire beat of journalism that’s not just following Wal-Mart, but following Wal-Mart’s PR. So every single thing that happens becomes a major story.” [Dezenhall, 8/18/06]

• CBS Evening News: “The civil rights leader and former U.N. ambassador was paid to be the public face of working families for Wal-Mart, a company funded support group. But hired to polish Wal-Mart’s image, Young has now tarnished it.” [Mason, 8/18/06]

• ABC World News: “Wal-Mart has become a symbol; it’s a symbol of too much power in the hands of too few.” [Dezenhall, 8/18/06]

• TheStreet.com: “How bad have things been going for Wal-Mart? Well, thanks to a public comment by one of its officials this week, even Arabs and Jews are agreeing: They hate Wal-Mart. That makes what Dell has been doing, what with its portables apparently igniting ammo stashes in customer’s pickup trucks, look like fun in the sun.” [Fuchs, 8/19/06]

• Bloomberg News: “Given Mr. Young’s reputation, his remarks must have ‘blindsided’ Wal-Mart, said [public relations executive] Howard Rubenstein… Mr. Young’s remarks also sting because Wal-Mart is already under attack for how it treats workers, he said. ‘They have a problem because it emphasizes the problem that they’ve had,’” Mr. Rubenstein said. [Coleman-Lochner, 8/19/06]

• BET News: “When Young decided to join ranks with the giant retailer from Bentonville, Ark., in February, he got a lot of flack from Black community activists who say the company’s pay and benefits do little to help poor entry-level workers.” [Stokes, 8/18/06]

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Young’s sudden resignation is ‘certainly a black eye’ for Wal-Mart, said Daniel Binder, an analyst for Buckingham Research Group in New York. ‘They have been trying to repair their public relations problems, and he was supposed to be part of the solution.’” [Geewax, 8/19/06]

• New York Times: “In the six months that Mr. Young was under contract with the Wal-Mart-financed group, he traveled the country promoting the retailer, meeting with community groups and writing opinion pieces for local newspapers. ‘I am more of a spokesman than the chairman of Wal-Mart,’ he remarked, referring to his work on behalf of the company.” [Barbaro & Greenhouse, 8/18/06]

• CNBC Closing Bell: “Wal-Mart and Andrew Young have parted company with almost NASCAR-like speed. But both have seen their images take a hit. Wal-Mart hired… Young to boost its image and lessen resistance to the retailer giant locating super stores in minority communities. Now it appears Young went too far.” [Pearson, 8/18/06]

• Associated Press: “‘Things that are matter-of-fact in Atlanta, in the New York and Los Angeles environment tend to be a lot more volatile,’ [Young] said. He also said working with the group “was also taking more of my time than I thought.’” [McGhee, 8/18/06]

• CNN Live Saturday: “More now from the foot in the mouth file: Former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young wasn’t being very diplomatic this week when talking up retailer Wal-Mart. Young had been hired to boost the company’s image, but he didn’t last long.” [Lin, 8/19/06]

• Times of London: “The speed with which the affair exploded, however, suggests that U.S. consumers are prone to think pretty poorly of the super-retailer… Wal-Mart’s task of convincing Americans that it is a good corporate citizen just got harder.” [Cole, 8/19/06]

• Bloomberg News: “[Young’s] consulting firm, Atlanta-based GoodWorks International L.L.C., had a contract with Wal-Mart. Working Families for Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Sheridan would not comment on the status of the contract. The group ‘will move forward aggressively’ to replace Young, Sheridan said.” [Coleman-Lochner, 8/19/06]

• Washington Post: “But Charles Fishman of Fast Company magazine, who wrote the book ‘The Wal-Mart Effect,’ said that neither Young nor the Working Families group was likely to have much effect on shoppers, for better or for worse. ‘Working Families for Wal-Mart isn’t actually going to ultimately change anybody’s opinion about Wal-Mart. What’s going to change people’s opinion about Wal-Mart is how Wal-Mart behaves,’ he said. ‘It turns out there’s a difference between PR and reality.’” [Mui & Joyce, 8/19/06]