Slander?

John Mackey is one of the biggest supporters of organic foods in the US, and is a principled and committed advocate of the social responsibility of business. Despite overseeing a company that makes $8bn revenue a year, his 2008 salary was about £20,000 (he sold most of his stock to set up a fund for employees that have financial difficulties). Just a cursory glance at what Whole Foods do show a company committed to a wide range of "ethical" causes, and a track record in stakeholder concerns. For example:

• The Environmental Protection Agency's "Green Power Partner of the Year", 2006
• Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" every years since it began in 1998
• 2006 Harris Interactive/The Wall Street Journal ranking of the world's best and worst corporate reputations, Whole Foods placed 12th overall and received the best score of any company for social responsibility
• 54th in Corporate Responsibility Officer magazine's annual "100 Best Corporate Citizens" list for 2007

Anti-capitalist environmentalists often claim that they're not opposed to business per se, just how it is routinely conducted. I think it's fair to say that if Whole Foods don't pass the bar then we can discount such claims as deceit. So I've found it incredibly interesting to see the following story in The Guardian. In brief, Mackey has expressed concerns that the whilst the company sells a great deal of healthy products, they still stock things that are fundamentally unhealthy (e.g. organic potato chips are healthier than non-organice, but are still pretty unhealthy). Mackey has expressed a desire to go even further - to not only provide relatively healthy products, but limit themselves to absolutely healthy ones. This also comes as part of a broader strategy to improve the health of its employees, and provide greater education within its stores. So why has the Mark Tran (the author of the article) jumped on the fact that Mackey described their non healthy food as "junk"? Why has the sub-editor referred to the store as "struggling" in it's byline? Reading through the article it reads as a complete stitch up - they've jumped onto a relatively inocuous comment to paint the company in as negative light as possible? Why?

The only thing I can think of is that Mackey is a reknowned libertarian. Despite being judged on his actions - which are incredibly compatible with the agenda that The Guardian typically espouses, he's being judged on his philosophical beleifs, or at least someone's inaccurate interpretation of those beliefs. Whole Foods is the prime example of why the left's use of Milton Friedman's comments about social responsibilty of business is simplistic and wrong. I'd be very interested to hear what non-libertarians think about this - why has Mackey been stitched up?

Correction: As Jim points out in the comments, The Guardian are not the only paper to report this and therefore my claims to some sort of conspiracy theory are pretty weak. Indeed Mark Tran, the author of article, has sent me the following (reproduced with permission):

I hadn't even realised he was a libertarian and the blog sees conspiracy where none is intended. It was just to point out that he could have chosen better words to make his point. I think the quotes I used in the piece conveyed the context of his "junk" statement. And Whole Foods is struggling in the UK, no question about that.

So, to conclude: my criticism was that Mark Tran jumped on Mackey's use of the term "junk", and that the subeditor described them as "struggling". I stand by both points - it's a classic attempt to make a story out of nothing, and whilst Mark is right to say it's "struggling in the UK", the subeditor promoted this to "struggling US store". This is clearly misleading - the company is not struggling. We haven't resolved the main thrust of what I've said - the possibility that Mackey's philosophical background is a root cause of this negative treatment, and whilst we've certainly absconded the author from any participation we've extended the range of possible conspiritors. You might just dismiss this as symptomatic of British journalism, but I do wonder if there's more to it. 

In the interests of full disclosure, I am a subscriber to some of the same free market/libertarian discussion groups as Mackey and have several mutual friends.

Comments

[Jim]

That's a rather paranoid conclusion to draw. I'm not defending the Guardian as that story is sloppy and misleading in the extreme, but they are far from the only offenders on this. In fact there seems to have been some collective decision among the British press (and possibly in other countries) to grossly misrepresent what Mackey said (see http://news.google.co.uk/news?q=whole+foods+junk&ie=UTF-8). I'm not sure why - maybe because the story ties in with the Food Standards Agency report on organic.

So I don't think it's a sinister Guardianista campaign to discredit libertarians, unless you think the Guardian is also planting stories in the Telegraph and dozens of other news sources.

[aje]

Far enough Jim, I've heard from the author of the Guardian article and he confirms what you've said. Evidently there's even more bias through other papers and he didn't even know Mackey was a libertarian. Thanks for correcting me.

[Jim]

Re your update, I really wish the only problem with British journalism was that it took unfair potshots at libertarians, but it's not. Crapness abounds in all directions, and I really don't think this one group has any claim to particular victimhood. But if you come up with any actual evidence I'm open to changing my mind.

[aje]

I wasn't criticising "British journalism" in my post - I was criticising a specific article. I accept that crapness abounds in all directions, but my point is that i'd expect The Guardian to be biased in the other direction. So i'm speculating about why they're not.

[Jim]

You're annoyed that the Guardian isn't biased?

[aje]

I'm wondering why they're biased in the opposite direction to what you'd expect