If you haven’t paid attention to the New York Times’ attempt to smear analysts at conservative think tanks who have written in defense of Wal-Mart, all you need to know is on the Times’ corrections page today (hat tip- Brian Anderson of City Journal):

Editors’ Note

An article in Business Day on Friday reported that the Walton Family Foundation had made contributions to four conservative research groups whose analysts wrote articles favorable to Wal-Mart Stores for newspapers and journals around the country. The Times article said that the groups and their employees had consistently failed to disclose the donations, and it said in the first paragraph that the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research was one of them. But a Manhattan Institute author had told The Times that he had indeed disclosed contributions from the Walton Foundation in an article he wrote, a fact that should have been included in the Times article.

The article also reported that Tim Kane of the Heritage Foundation and Karl Zinsmeister, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, were among those who wrote articles favorable to Wal-Mart after their foundations received a donation.

Both those groups were called for comment for the Times article. Mr. Kane, who was not called, subsequently said that he did not know about the Walton Family Foundation contribution and that he had criticized Wal-Mart’s call for a higher federal minimum wage in an article he wrote. The Times also did not ask Mr. Zinsmeister to comment, but he declined to do so when reached after the Times article was published. Both Mr. Kane and Mr. Zinsmeister should have been asked to comment before publication.

John Hood has more, including links to two terrific slapbacks from Thomas Sowell and John McWhorter.

You have to see the print version of the article to see how disgusting the smear really was. It was a massive front-page business section spread with thumbnail photos of conservative analysts, dripping with insinuation that conservative think tankers were whoring for Wal-Mart and failing to properly disclose ties to the Walton family.

But as the Business & Media Institute points out, Wal-Mart has given far more money to left labor groups than to right-wing groups:

New York Times reporters Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Strom took a shot at Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) with a September 8 article slamming conservative think tanks for receiving money from the Walton family.

Yet an August 2006 review of IRS records shows that Wal-Mart gives nearly 300 times as much money to liberal think tanks as it does to conservative ones. Barbaro himself also reported that labor unions in 2005 gave about the same amount in one year to one liberal think tank.

Barbaro and Strom led the story noting that “top policy analysts” at “prominent conservative research groups” have penned op-eds, “defended the company in interviews with reporters, and testified on its behalf before government committees in Washington.”

The article then complained that these experts “have consistently failed to disclose a tie to the giant discount retailer,” or funding from “the Walton Family Foundation,” a philanthropy run by Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s heirs (although separate from the corporation itself).

All told, the Times correspondents added, Walton Family Foundation donations to conservative groups that have defended the retailer “totaled more than $2.5 million over the last six years” – a matter, he insisted, that raises “questions about what the research groups should disclose to newspaper editors, reporters or government officials.”

Yet buried deeper in his story, Barbaro acknowledged that labor unions, which are critical of non-unionized Wal-Mart, pumped about the same amount of money in 2005 into one liberal think tank: the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

What’s more, Wal-Mart gives a large sum from its corporate coffers to liberal advocacy groups, the Capital Research Center concluded in an August 2006 review of IRS records.

The study by researcher David Hogberg, now a senior analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research, found that of the $150 million in donations given by Wal-Mart in 2004, only $2,530 went to politically right-of-center organizations while 289 times as much went to left-of-center think tanks, a total of $732,350.

John Miller writes:

“The NYT desperately would like to think that when conservatives defend Wal-Mart from the enemies of capitalism, it’s because Wal-Mart has bought them off. You know, because in ordinary circumstances free marketeers would support the store’s demonization by the labor-backed groups that want to unionize its workers or regulate it out of existence….The question-raisers who are quoted are either unionists, leftists, or both. What we have here is the very definition of a phony controversy.”

A phony controversy–and as the correction underscores, another rancid piece of shoddy journalism from the newspaper of wreckage.

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Clay Waters at Newsbusters has more:

Check for yourself the underwhelming figures to conservative organizations like Heritage ($5,000 in 2004) as opposed to nonpolitical groups like the United Way of San Diego County ($120,000 in 2004).

A graphic headlined “The Money Behind the Voices” spells out the “Walton Family Foundation Total Contributions, 1999-2004.”

Over five years, according to the Times, the Manhattan Institute received $396,000, the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy $175,000, and The American Enterprise Institute $107,900. Those figures run alongside favorable quotes about Wal-Mart from MI’s John McWhorter, PRI’s Sally Pipes, and American Enterprise magazine’s Karl Zinsmeister. That would lead a casual reader to believe the Times is suggesting a quid pro quo, though the article itself admits that “the pro-business philosophies of these groups often dovetail with the interests of Wal-Mart.”

To put those figures in perspective, the foundation gave out $117 million in grants in 2004 alone — making the grants to those conservative groups over a five-year period seem rather puny.

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