Walmart, The Media, and Campaigns

If in the post-election debate of 2006, Walmart separated itself from all the promotion done by its stockholders in the Arango family in favor of the triumph of National Action Party (PAN) presidential candidate Felipe Calderón, today it is the PAN candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, who would be cutting herself off from Walmart and the ways its stockholders promoted her.

Nothing personal. In the course of the polarization and the mobilizations of Andrés Manuel López Obrador against all that smells of support for Calderón’s victory, the U.S. commercial giant made it clear that it did not want to associate its image with one of the camps. Above all because the opposite camp pressured it with marches, sit-ins, and verbal violence filled with opprobrium for the candidate-declared-victor who supported or simply accepted the narrow electoral result of 2006.

Today, quite the opposite in the PAN campaign’s current state: nothing less than seeing the campaign associated with a business under U.S. penal investigation and put on trial in Mexican media close-ups, after what The New York Times placed on Sunday’s front page, and on the global agenda, the U.S. judicial investigations. This central theme of the Mexican agenda brings to light evidence of the determining relationships of communication with all forms of power.

The Power of the Media

The first piece of evidence is this: that which consolidates in communication channels is as much market power in the economy as political power in the market of votes. These communication channels are designed to produce favorable environments of opinion – through the media – with an end toward dominating a social space. From there, the emphasis of 2006 of the vice president of Walmart Corporate Affairs, Raúl Argüelles, in the “strict ethical codes” on which the company said it bases its “attitude of impartiality in the [Mexican] electoral process.” And from here–today’s perception that those strict ethical codes must not have worked, and the consequences–the brutal punishment of the stock exchanges for the corporation’s actions – as much on Wall Street as in the Mexican Stock Exchange.

A second piece of evidence is the power of the media as administrators of the reputation of economic, political and social actors. That The New York Times decided that it had something with which to strike a blow to the reputation and the favorable environment constructed by Walmart all over the world–this was enough for the Mexican media to play their part in the EU courts’ parallel judgment. And that power of the media to administrate the reputation of others directs itself now against all the Mexican actors that could be related not only with the bribes under investigation in the U.S., but also with any activity of the company and its stockholders.

Campaigns and Damage Control

And here is a third piece of evidence: with the administration of the reputation of the rest, the media and the channels of communication have a higher capacity for assigning and taking away power, and this manifests itself in the great capital’s pragmatism game and its tendency to bet on the campaigns of all political choices with power or real expectations of power. And here is our media exercising their power to administrate the reputation of the rest to give or take away power. Some, the majority, find in the PAN federal government’s inaction in the face of the U.S. discoveries of Mexican corruption the proof of complicity between the company and the PAN campaigns. Others have just discovered family and business connections between Walmart and the Party of the Democratic Revolution Federal District government and also with its campaigns. And there are those who find connections with the Institutional Revolutionary Party campaign, because a member of the board for the U.S. corporation attended a campaign ceremony for Peña.

But for Walmart and its Mexican counterparts it is the hour of damage control, not of rooting out the causes of the crisis. Until the next one.