CJR - NYT Reporting Obscures $39.5 Million In Wal-Mart Funding For Environmental Defense Fund
A recent New York Times article about the Environmental Defense Fund’s efforts to help Wal-Mart “cut waste” painted an incomplete picture of the group’s relationship with the retail giant, offering an instructive lesson in “green business” coverage in the process.
The article, which ran on the front of the paper’s business section on April 13, described Wal-Mart’s “mixed degree of progress” toward achieving a variety of goals—from recycling, to energy use, to fuel efficiency—that it set for itself in 2005. The “environmental push has helped transform public opinion of the company, easing the way for it to open stores in urban areas like Chicago and Los Angeles,” the Times’s Stephanie Clifford reported, and the EDF and other groups “have been advising Wal-Mart on its changes.” Clifford added:
The fund opened an office in Bentonville in 2007 so it could have direct access to Wal-Mart. It does not accept contributions from Wal-Mart or other corporations it works with.
What the article didn’t mention is that between 2003 and 2010, the latest year for which tax data are available, the Walton Family Foundation gave the EDF almost $39.5 million—and the funding ramped up around the time Wal-Mart launched its sustainability initiative. In 2009, the foundation’s gift represented roughly 13 percent of the fund’s total revenues.
EDIT
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/nyt_obscures_wal-mart_edf_link.php
