The Whole Truth on Internet Message Boards

From the headlines: Whole Foods chief accused of anonymously bashing a rival company on Internet chat board.
John Mackey, who co-founded natural foods giant Whole Foods in 1980 and has served as its CEO ever since, is under the gun for posting some pretty slanderous stuff about his chief rival on a Yahoo message board, using a screen name that gave no hint as to who he was (he went by "rahodeb," an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah). And, lo and behold, Whole Foods is now trying to acquire that rival, Wild Oats.

All of this is coming out as part of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission suit trying to block the impending free-range broccoli monopoly. But let's leave the legal stuff out of it for a second, and look at the ethical lines that are in play.

Whole Foods claims Mackey went incognito "to avoid having his comments associated with the company and to avoid others placing too much emphasis on his remarks." Well thank you, Whole Foods PR flacks, for that concise summary. Seriously, that is awesome.

Their argument is that Mackey is still ethically intact -- at least enough so to remain as the captain of the ship -- because he was posting as "rahodeb" instead of "John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO." Here's the crazy part of that argument: it's not that crazy. It's petty and a bit childish for a person of his stature, but in an era when Congress gets banned from Wikipedia for altering their own profiles, this exploitation of Internet anonymity can't come as a surprise..

Internet message boards are rife with crap; anyone who frequents a message board on a regular basis can tell you as much. The thing is that while they may appear to be a marketplace of lies, for a poster to have an impact they have to be speaking the truth. If you read a message board for any period of time, you know who is a good poster and who is a bad poster, regardless of their screen name. So for "rahodeb" to have any impact that could sway the fate of Wild Oats, his posts would need to make sense or else those who frequent the board would pay him no mind, and thus his statements would have no real impact.

Mackey's spent 27 years as a CEO. There are probably a lot of things he'd love to tell the world that "John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO" is not allowed to tell the world. As a journalist who's spent years having "important people" tell me the "story," then go "off the record" and tell me the real story, I can assure you that these people struggle all the time with the burden of having everything they say have "too much emphasis."

Should he have been doing this? No, especially if he thought he was ever going to attempt to buy the company in question. Is he the only one doing it? Hell, no. He's just the sucker who got caught.

If anything, his anonymous posts are an ethical drop in the pan compared to the idea that he's taking a company that has institutionalized the idea of a socially conscious grocery store down a monopolistic path that is starting to smell a bit like an organic Wal-Mart.

Have a workplace-ethics dilemma? Ask it here, or email wherestheline@gmail.com.