Corporations

"Wal-Mart is working with Hill & Knowlton on a PR campaign designed to rehabilitate the much-maligned company's reputation in California and pave the way for 40 new Wal-Mart Supercenters in the state in the next few years," PR Week reports.

"Food industry lobbyists met privately with Bush administration officials 10 times while the government was crafting rules to protect the food supply from bioterrorism." The Center for Science in the Public Interest stated, "The result is regulations that the industry likes, but that don't fully protect the public interest." The Grocery Manufacturers of America, Altria Group and others lobbied to weaken propos

"For the third time, environmental advocates have discovered passages in the Bush administration's proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants that mirror almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants." The passages, in language from the Latham & Watkins firm, say the

Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott recently said, "We have not gotten our story out to the extent that we need to." The head of the global super store told a retailing conference that Wal-Mart's bad reputation came from newspapers and television. But a New York Times editorial responded that "if Wal-Mart wants to improve its image, it should focus less on shaping its message and more on changing the way it does business. ... These damaging news stories are not a product of bad spin, but bad facts.