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CNN’s ‘In the Money’ Team Loves Jabs at Wal-Mart
JibJab animated attack on retailer finds
a welcome audience on cable news.
By Dan Gainor
The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow
Free Market Project
Oct. 21, 2005
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The way to the media’s heart is to take jabs at Wal-Mart – JibJabs,
that is. JibJab.com, the maker of several popular political videos,
unleashed an assault on the nation’s biggest retailer that one CNN
journalist called “priceless” and another called “hilarious.” Â Â Â Â CNN was especially friendly to the team of Evan and
Gregg Spiridellis, dwelling on the video in two separate programs.
CNN’s Money.com Managing Editor Alan Wastler even called the video
company “our friends at JibJab” during the October 22 “In the Money”
show. Not to be outdone, anchor Jack Cafferty said, “I love those
guys.” |
CNN
Oct. 24, 2005
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    That was how CNN led into a clip of the anti-Wal-Mart
attack that features a potbellied shopper filling first a cart and
then a house with mountains of retail “crap.” CNN pointed viewers to
the video by naming JibJab one of its recommended “Funsites.”
 Â Â Â Â But the video isn’t about fun – a fact obvious to
anyone who watched the audience reaction when it debuted October 13
on the “Jay Leno Show.” The video showed to an audience that rarely
made any noise at all during the more than two-minute diatribe
against Big Box-Mart, the video’s made up name for Wal-Mart.
    Wastler even went further in his assessment of the
video, claiming, “It shows the economic cycle of eventually you put
yourself out of work and end up working at Big Box-Mart.” Even the
CNN team didn’t try to pretend that video meant any store other than
“Wal-Mart.”
    The October 17 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” also welcomed “the
online satirists” with open arms. Dobbs referred to the video as a
“devastating, hilarious look at the state of our nation’s economy.”
He then argued “it shows how major retailers are helping out the
middle class.” The broadcast was then turned over his program to
JibJab, broadcasting the entire video.
    Dobbs followed up by interviewing the “geniuses” behind
the video that “made us laugh.” Dobbs continued his attack on
Wal-Mart and “this business practice that we consider
extraordinarily wrongheaded.”
    Dobbs continued by calling it a “devastating piece of
satire.” He did briefly address Wal-Mart’s position, because the
firm had pointed out that the JibJab video was wildly one-sided. He
gave Wal-Mart a back-handed compliment saying that Wal-Mart’s
request for a sequel that “lampoons Wal-Mart’s critics” was “about
as a humane expression as I’ve heard from Wal-Mart in some time.”
    The October 14 “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Fox
News hammered home the lack of balance in a stronger way. Fox’s
Stuart Varney asked the JibJab duo directly, “So, are you going to
come up with a sequel that lampoons Wal-Mart’s critics, guys?” After
laughing, hemming and hawing, Gregg Spiridellis vowed that “we will
definitely take it into consideration,” which likely was a nice way
of saying “no.” Varney also dared to ask the JibJabbers whether they
were “very much left of center,” although they denied it.
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