[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 24 (Tuesday, March 8, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 8, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                   MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE NAFTA DEBATE

 Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, the battle over the ratification of 
the North American Free Trade Agreement last fall received extensive 
attention in the Nation's media, but a strong case can be made that the 
coverage was not very balanced. Our distinguished colleague, Senator 
Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, has calculated that, for example, the 
Washington Post devoted some 756 column inches to pro-NAFTA editorials 
and columns, while anti-NAFTA op-ed pieces got only 132 inches. His 
thought-provoking critique of the media's handling of the NAFTA debate 
was published in the January/February, 1994 issue of the Columbia 
Journalism Review. Senator Dorgan forcefully criticizes the biases and 
premises of major media outlets and attacks their over-simplification 
and mischaracterization of NAFTA opponents' arguments against the 
Treaty. I commend Senator Dorgan's article to the attention of my 
colleagues. I ask that a copy of this article be printed in the Record 
following my remarks.
  The article follows:

          [From the Columbia Journalism Review, February 1994]

                    The NAFTA Debate That Never Was

                          (By Byron L. Dorgan)

       At a forum on journalists and NAFTA last month, James 
     Glassman, a regular contributor to The Washington Post 
     business page, defended his paper's lopsided coverage of the 
     recent trade debate. There are issues, Glassman said, on 
     which to be fair to both sides is to do a ``disservice to the 
     debate.'' In other words, NAFTA opponents like myself just 
     couldn't match his mental voltage, and to take us seriously 
     was merely to propagate our ignorance.
       ``To me,'' Glassman said, ``NAFTA never should have been 
     this close.''
       That admission does not surprise me. Nor does it surprise 
     me that, for all the ink that flowed on NAFTA, people still 
     tell me they have only a vague notion of what the issues 
     really were. For months, I and other members of Congress 
     tried to engage a real public debate over the economics of 
     NAFTA, and we just couldn't.
       Instead, the media caricatured NAFTA opponents and created 
     straw men: Pat Buchanan the nativist and primitive, Ross 
     Perot the kook, plus a bunch of Smoot-Hawley retards, labor 
     dupes, and backwoods isolationists. (Our opposition was based 
     solely on ``fear of change and fear of foreigners,'' asserted 
     Anthony Lewis in The New York Times, expressing the 
     condescension of the mainstream press.)
       As the debate heated up, the media reduced it to the 
     familiar horse race--how many more votes does the 
     president need?--and gave short shrift to both the 
     specifics of the treaty and its antiquated conceptual 
     underpinnings. Throughout, the media showed great 
     reverence for credentialed experts (in the Times, Sylvia 
     Nasar cited economist Paul Samuelson's ``legendary 
     textbook'') and an inability to consider the possibility 
     that these experts were--gasp!--wrong. The phrase 
     ``economists say'' because the end of the discussion, when 
     it should have been the beginning.
       As a result, we NAFTA opponents felt trapped in an Alice-
     in-Wonderland world in which things reported were the 
     opposite of things that were. For example, we read that we 
     were hysterical alarmists, while the mainstream media were 
     the ones who were hyperventilating. If we sent NAFTA back for 
     more work, Business Week warned in large ominous type, ``the 
     consequences for the world could be dire.'' We were lectured 
     on the bracing rigors of competition by reporters and 
     columnists whose own jobs were safe, by reason of language 
     and caste, from the inroads of dollar-an-hour Mexican labor. 
     Most of all, we kept hearing about an imposing anti-NAFTA 
     juggernaut, while these same newspapers and magazines were in 
     effect forming a pro-NAFTA juggernaut of their own.
       The cheerleading became so loud that I decided to count 
     copy. From January on, The Washington Post devoted some 
     sixty-three feet to pro-NAFTA editorials and columns, while 
     the anti-NAFTA side got only eleven feet. At other major 
     papers, the ratio was about the same, or even more lopsided. 
     The news pages, meanwhile, were implicitly conveying the same 
     message: we opponents deserved no more than the obligatory 
     balancing quote. Stories in The New York Times quoted three 
     NAFTA supporters for every NAFTA opponent, according to FAIR, 
     the media-watch group. At the Post, the tilt was more than 
     four to one.
       In other words, while the major papers preached free trade 
     for the economic marketplace, they practiced intellectual 
     protectionism--a kind of journalistic Smoot-Hawley--in the 
     marketplace of ideas.
       Meanwhile, the way the media dealt with NAFTA itself was 
     grossly simplistic. Dismissing what they clearly considered 
     petty details and focusing on ``the big picture,'' reporters, 
     columnists, and commentators almost uniformly played NAFTA as 
     an abstract debate over ``free trade'' rather than as a 
     specific trade agreement that is severely flawed in ways 
     large and small. It was as though the media were debating the 
     merits of medical insurance, as opposed to the specific 
     proposals for providing it.
       Most Americans never found out, for example, that, behind 
     the veil of ``free trade,'' NAFTA protects Mexican producers 
     of everything from potatoes to beans. The U.S. agreed to 
     phase out its tariffs on Mexican potatoes over five years, 
     while Mexico will take ten years to eliminate its own 
     tariffs. America opens the door to Mexican french fries 
     immediately, while Mexico sets a quota for U.S. fries at less 
     than the 1991 level and continues its current 15-20 percent 
     tariff for ten years.
       Free trade? Or just a great deal for corporate food 
     processors who want to move to Mexico and to sell back into 
     the U.S.? That kind of question--and potatoes and french 
     fries are just two of thousands of such issues--rarely got 
     asked.
       The media were similarly myopic on the ``big picture'' 
     itself--the economic premises on which the whole agreement 
     was based. A piece by David Rosenbaum in the Times on 
     September 19 was typical. Good Economics Meet Protective 
     Politics was the headline, embracing two erroneous 
     assumptions in just five words. In The New Yorker, Sidney 
     Blumenthal quoted Mickey Kantor, the administration's trade 
     rep, approvingly. The only obstacle to the agreement was 
     dumb, benighted politics. Kantor said, ``We have won the 
     intellectual argument on this.''
       Just possibly they won because the media permitted only a 
     straw man to get into the debate. The debate was not over 
     fair and open trade. Of course, we need that. Rather, the 
     debate was--or should have been--over the rules for such 
     trade, and over the system of governance to enforce those 
     rules. Ultimately, it was--or should have been--over whether 
     NAFTA is based on the world economy that actually exists or 
     the relic that inhabits economic theory.
       ``Since the time of Adam Smith more than 200 years ago,'' 
     Rosenbaum wrote, ``Western economists have been trained in 
     the principle that unrestricted trade is the best policy.'' 
     Great. But isn't that precisely the kind of conventional 
     wisdom that reporters ought to be questioning? As James 
     Fallows pointed out in The Atlantic last month, ``Western'' 
     really means ``Anglo-American.'' Much of the rest of the 
     world simply doesn't follow the pronouncements that 
     economists in Britain and America take as gospel. In 
     addition, Rosenbaum typically didn't go on to ask the 
     crucial question: Exactly how does the conventional Anglo-
     American belief apply in a world that is fundamentally 
     different from the one in which Smith wrote?
       The modern corporation, for example, the dominant part of 
     our economic landscape, didn't even exist in Adam Smith's 
     day. Back then, producers were rooted in locality and nation, 
     and their interests could hardly be separated from the 
     national interest. Today, by contrast, capital is ``mobile,'' 
     in the economists' phrase. It's a sort of international free 
     agency, a ball game in which the major players can change 
     sides in the middle of the game.
       In this context, orthodox free trade becomes a contest to 
     attract corporate producers. Rather than competing to sell 
     products, nations compete to attract the corporate investment 
     to make the products. The result is to intensify ``smokestack 
     chasing,'' the kind of bidding war that has driven states to 
     offer massive taxpayer subsidies to private organizations and 
     that, on the international level, can drag down safety and 
     environmental standards.
       In this sense, NAFTA was not so much wrong as half-baked. 
     It frees capital investment, but lacks a system of governance 
     to ensure that the resulting trade is fair and really works 
     to the benefit of this nation. We could have drafted a better 
     version that addressed this defect, but we didn't.
       NAFTA does create a governance system. But it's one that 
     enables corporations to challenge our environmental and other 
     laws as ``barriers to trade.'' My state has a law against 
     corporate farming. Will that now be seen as a ``barrier'' to 
     foreign investment that corporations can strike down? Rarely 
     did the media explore the implications of the dispute 
     process. Nor did reporters ask how it would work in practice. 
     North Dakota has had sobering experience, under the Canadian 
     Free Trade Agreement which was a kind of preview of NAFTA.
       To make a long story short, Canadian farmers flooded the 
     American market with subsidized durum wheat, the kind used in 
     pasta. The price was so low that they displaced about a third 
     of the durum acreage in my state. Yet the special panel 
     created under the agreement decided that the Canadian 
     subsidies didn't count. It turned out that the U.S. 
     negotiators had made a secret deal to that effect. Are there 
     any such secret deals in NAFTA? Do we have any reason to 
     believe that the dispute process in the Mexican agreement 
     will work out any better? Few reporters bothered to ask. Nor 
     did the media explore such questions as how the IRS, with its 
     outdated multinational tax enforcement methods, is going to 
     stop corporations from juggling profits between their 
     subsidiaries on both sides of the border.
       Already, some 72 percent of foreign-controlled corporations 
     (and more than half of U.S.-controlled multinationals) pay 
     not a penny in federal income taxes, thanks largely to such 
     juggling. If the IRS does not scrap its green-eyeshade-era 
     methods, NAFTA will only make the problem worse.
       On October 26, 1993, while the NAFTA fracas raged on, the 
     New York Times ran a front-page analysis of the economics of 
     medical care that challenged the textbook market model. The 
     reporter, the same David Rosenbaum who didn't question 
     NAFTA's gospel, showed why that premise just doesn't work in 
     the medical industry as it exists today. That's the kind of 
     thinking reporters should bring to the realm of trade. 
     Watergate taught the media to be skeptical of elected 
     officials. Now it's time for a similar skepticism regarding 
     credentialed economic experts. The media also should practice 
     what they preach. If they are going to lecture on the 
     importance of free and open markets, then they should permit 
     free and open debate in their own marketplace of 
     ideas.

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