For anyone who still harbors any illusion whatsoever that Fox News is a network of fairness and balance, consider the video of host Stuart Varney giving Walmart spokesman David Tovar what may just be the most apologetic, fawning, borderline promotion of an interview in the network’s history. Immediately followed by a banner ad saying that the segment was brought to us by Walmart. Oversight or metaphorical middle finger to the company’s employees? You be the judge.

Here's a partial list of questions Tovar was asked by Varney:

"David, you've taken on the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, I believe. You've filed this complaint against them. Is that enough to stop any walkout the day after Thanksgiving? Our viewers, maybe some Walmart shoppers, they want to know, are they gonna hit these roadblocks?" "Now you've filed a complaint against the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. You said 'hey, stop messing around with our business.' Can you sue them? Can you take them for any money if your complaint is valid?" "One last one: the storm, Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast area, New York in particular. You're not allowed to do business in New York City and yet, I believe, you were handing out a lot of stuff to the victims of Sandy. Is that correct?"

My, my my… but aren’ those questions just so “Fair and Balanced”?! Never mind that part of the outrage is that Bloomberg reports the final straws being their health care getting scaled back:

In 2013, Wal-Mart plans to scale back its contributions to workers’ health-care premiums, which are expected to rise between 8 percent and 36 percent.

As well as Extended Black Friday hours:

Along with Target (TGT) and Sears (SHLD), Wal-Mart has plans to open retail stores at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Employees said they weren’t given a choice as to whether they would work on Thanksgiving and were told to do so with little warning. Along with Target (TGT) and Sears (SHLD), Wal-Mart has plans to open retail stores at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Employees said they weren’t given a choice as to whether they would work on Thanksgiving and were told to do so with little warning.

And let’s not forget that Walmart actually insulted their own agitated employees while talking to the press:

In an e-mail, Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg called the strike “just another exaggerated publicity campaign aimed at generating headlines to mislead” the retailer’s customers and employees. “The fact is, these ongoing tactics being orchestrated by the UFCW are unlawful and we will act to protect our associates and customers from this ongoing illegal conduct,” he wrote, referring to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

There is also the little matter of that Walmart apparently doesn’t believe in the right to protest. According to The Nation, Walmart is indeed making their first filing to the NLRB in a decade - to have the protests deemed a UFCW stunt, thereby enabling them to take action against those mean ol’ poor people:

The National Labor Relations Board, created by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, is tasked with enforcing and interpreting private sector labor law. Walmart’s charge, filed Thursday night and reported by Reuters Friday evening, sets two processes in motion. The first, which could take months, is the full investigation and resolution of the allegation, beginning with fact-finding by board agents based in Walmart’s backyard (NLRB Region 26, which covers Arkansas and three other states). The second, which could advance as soon as this week, is the decision whether to grant an injunction restricting strikes against Walmart while the investigation proceeds. Experts say NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon would have final say over whether the board seeks the injunction; if it does, a district court judge will decide whether to grant it.

[…]

Walmart’s letter to the UFCW accuses the union of “enlisting them in orchestrated schemes to disrupt Walmanrt’s business operations by telling them that federal labor law protects their participation” in strikes that are in fact illegal, and thus could get workers fired (the letter also alleges that the protests involve range of crimes beyond those in the NLRB charge, including trespassing). A Walmart spokesperson drove a similar message home Sunday, telling CNN that if workers don’t show up on Black Friday, “there could be consequences.” The target audience for that statement, and for Walmart’s latest legal salvo, may not be the media, or the courts, or the UFCW, but the thousands of workers who want to see change at Walmart but have haven’t yet decided whether going on strike is worth the risk.

The same article offers this little nugget from Seyfarth Shaw lawyer (and Reagan-era NLRB chair) Marshall Bobson:

To prove that the strike is recognitional, said Babson, “There really has to be a demand for recognition from the employer. It’s that simple.” According to Babson, who’s now a management-side labor law attorney for the firm Seyfarth Shaw, “The way many employers deal with this, and this is something you learn in management labor lawyer school 101, is you send somebody out there to the picket line,” ask who’s in charge, and “you say, ‘What do we have to do to get you to go away?’ If they say recognize the union, then that’s it, that’s the end of the inquiry.” But “If they said, ‘We want you to treat us better, we want you to pay wages and benefits that are more comparable with the area standards,’ that’s not recognitional picketing, unless there’s some other evidence.

It was so nice of Varney to completely gloss over these points. Walmart definitely got what they paid for in this segment. But the joke may be on them. There's a real possibility Varney would have done all this for free.