T he announcement that Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose, among other bastions of the liberal media elite, would be toasting Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott for his environmentalism at a private October 23 event at the Rainbow Room turned into a minor scandal quickly. The Hollywood trades said Weinstein was just sucking up to help his company’s relationship to the only DVD retailer that matters. After the PBS ombudsman scolded Rose for possibly “diminishing the integrity or credibility of public broadcasting,” the Times wrote a story that seemed to have a bit of a furrowed brow, too. So what happened? According to a witness, the other guests (including media bigs Jimmy Dolan and Bob Wright) got to see Scott argue jovially with Rose and listen to Don Henley rock out. The laughs came after a video promoting Wal-Mart’s organic-cotton initiative showed Turkish children in the field picking the cotton. Its explanation: Families in Turkey consider harvesting a blessing, and so children work in the field. And the sole reason the video offered for using organic cotton was so that the wee hands of the kids picking it wouldn’t be exposed to pesticides.

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
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