In its ongoing campaign to counter all the negative media it’s attracted over the years, Wal-Mart is playing the blog card by sparkling bloggers’ eyes with “exclusive” news releases that accenturate the company’s viewpoint.

Naturally, content-starved (and lazy) bloggers lap it up,to the point of cutting-and-pasting the copy they get from Wal-Mart’s PR firm, Edelman, directly into their posts. Which, when viewed through search-engine prisms, quickly lets the cat out of the corporately-manipulated bag.

Isn’t this how Drudge hit it big? Republican spinmeisters spoon-fed him info about Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky affair, which he unquestionably put on his site. Because he was running his site before the term/concept “blog” was ever dreamed up, his slop was mistaken for reporting. (The joke continues, as people today inexplicably rely upon him.) Nearly a decade later, Edelman is repeating the process on Wal-Mart’s behalf.

It’s a testament to how highly Marshall Manson, Edelman’s point man for this effort, thinks of the blogosphere collectively. Yet I doubt it’ll be especially effective, even in online terms. One million gushing Wal-Mart posts wouldn’t equal the impact of, say, one Garth Brooks “Friends With Low Wages” parody video clip. People hate to read, but they’ll eat up audio/video timewasters.