Covering Nafta p. 16

By: Debra Gersh Hernandez

Panel examines reporting on the North America Free Trade
Agreement; columnist faults TV for 'anecdotal' coverage sp.

THE DEBATE ABOUT the North America Free Trade Agreement was reported extensively, but some wonder whether the quality of that coverage might have been better.
Opinions range from those who argue that reporters were among the "intellectual elite" who supported the measure to others who maintain that the media did not adequately explain what the treaty's effect on jobs might be to some who were critical of the "anecdotal" reportage.
These views and others were aired during a panel discussion hosted by the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va., during which journalists who covered NAFTA offered their assessments.
"The NAFTA debate was a very peculiar one in this city and the country because the divisions were not the usual left-right, conservative-liberal, Republican-Democrat split. The division was more horizontal," explained Newsday columnist Lars-Erik Nelson.
"It was an elite, monied people, educated people, [as] pro-NAFTA generally and working-class people, labor unions . . . in the opposition . . . ," Nelson said.
In that split, he said, "journalists are among the educated and, in this town, among the relatively affluent. So I think journalists found themselves for the first time almost universally sympathizing with the arguments of one side of a debate."
Nelson said this showed in the op-ed pages, "where almost all of the columnists were for NAFTA, almost all the editorial pages in the country were for NAFTA."
What troubled him was "an assumption, I think, on the part of NAFTA proponents that any intelligent person was for NAFTA . . . . Therefore, anybody who opposed NAFTA was either unintelligent or on the take, had some devious motive for opposing it, either political . . . or they'd been bought by a labor union.
"I think we ought to examine ourselves pretty carefully before we assume elitist positions in the public press," Nelson said.
Washington Post business columnist James Glassman agreed, admitting he "found it very difficult to oppose
NAFTA."
However, he added, "there are some issues, some economic issues, some public policy issues, where presenting both sides as though they carried equal weight does disservice to truth and to reality."
Glassman, who said he believes that the NAFTA vote should not have been as close as it was, said the issue was not just a "question of the importance of free trade," but a "much simpler issue" ? market opening.
"Now maybe our Mexican friends would have gotten offended, but I always felt that the main issue in
NAFTA was America should blast open the Mexican markets the same way that we should blast open Eastern markets," he said.
"I think that the reason NAFTA had a tough time was not only that the issue was not presented very well by the proponents but also because Americans felt that their economy was a lot worse off than the reality," he added, criticizing coverage, "not so much in the elite press, not so much in newspapers, but on television, [where] we get night after night this drumbeat of negative news . . . .
"The press, especially on TV, seems to have this genius for turning good news into bad news," Glassman said, quoting a media observer who noted that the discovery of electricity would have been reported on TV as a bad day for candle makers.
He did, however, point out that certain all-business news TV programs do cover these issues well.
"Anecdotes are the guts of television, and yet, anecdotes really don't describe what's going on in an economy," he said.
"This country has better statistical information than, I think, any other country in the world. It's not hard to find out what's going on in the economy, and yet, it's not reported, or it's reported in a very negative way."
Pointing to research that looked at 17,000 television news stories about the economy, Glassman said the research-ers found that only half used statistics.
"Now, personally, I write a column which I hope is accessible and chatty, but the idea of doing anything about economics and not using statistics is something I find unfathomable," he said. "It's like writing about a sports event without telling you what the score is or telling you what the weather's going to be tomorrow without giving the temperature."
In addition, Glassman said he thinks television coverage of NAFTA exacerbated the division between elites and blue-collar people.
"Unfortunately, there's a division in who reads newspapers and who watches television, especially for their only information," he said.
"And I think what happened here with NAFTA was a lot of people, by watching television and getting night after night this incredibly negative news, were scared to death about their own jobs when they really shouldn't have been. It was unjustified by the reality, and so that made it even worse."
Glassman also was critical of Americans' lack of understanding about basic economics and of the press' failure to explain it.
He said that because "elements of the press . . . don't understand these sort of basics of economics . . . we get people all scared, all upset about things they shouldn't be upset about.''
Drew Fagan, Washington correspondent at the Toronto Globe and Mail, said this debate took place five or six years ago in his country, when the United States and Canada were negotiating their free trade agreement.
By the time NAFTA, which included Mexico, was proposed, Canada "was very much the third wheel," Fagan said.
"We decided to enter into that primarily to protect our access to the United States market," he explained. "Mexico is nowhere near as important to Canadians as the United States is
. . . so the debate was nowhere near as important as the debate was in 1988. And that was reflected in the news coverage."
Fagan said there was much less coverage of NAFTA in Canadian media, "in part because the agreement is really an add-on."
What happened in 1993 was the elite press, "not just on the editorial boards but in articles as well, by and large taking a perspective that was it's a no-brainer. We'd gone through this in 1988. Mexico is an emerging market. It is opportunities for us."
After arriving in the United States, however, "it was fascinating to watch the Americans debate NAFTA because Americans were going through what Canada went through in 1988," Fagan said.
He also found it "fascinating to notice that Canada was effectively invisible in that debate . . . .
"Watching the coverage, often the deal would be written about as if it were a bilateral deal between Mexico and the United States," Fagan said, noting that he was not surprised, given the circumstances of the earlier trade deal.
"There is a hole, however, I think, in Canadian coverage as well," he said. "And that lies in our ability to cover Mexico. One thing the Americans have managed to do is be far more all-encompassing when it comes to the media effort to cover what's going on in Mexico."
That should change as Canadian interests in Mexico increase, he added.
Although Dallas Morning News Washington bureau reporter David LaGesse's position is a direct result of the agreement ? "proof that NAFTA does create jobs, at least one" ? he said he personally was ambivalent about the pact.
The paper's editorial page, however, was "just this side of crusading," La-Gesse said. "Our paper generally doesn't take part in crusades, but they felt very strongly about this and it was reflected in what I thought were thoughtful presentations but clearly falling on the side for NAFTA.
"I think that much of our coverage came out of the business page, which tended to show more the economic issues, and in that sense probably did reflect more of the arguments that
NAFTA would benefit both sides economically," he said.
"We did, though, also give extensive coverage to the problems along the border, both before and in the context of the NAFTA debate and, I think, in the larger sense did give it some balance.
"When it came to our coverage in Washington, I'll take some criticism there because I did not try to tackle the economic issues," LaGesse said. "Having come to the debate as late as I did, I really covered it more as a horse race, as a political story. So I certainly don't feel that I added much to the substance of the debate. But in the end, I think it was a fascinating political story. That's what I came to Washington to write about."
LaGesse was one of the few panelists to defend the electronic media for "providing more of the emotional side of the debate."
"Maybe, in the larger scheme of things, there was some balance," he said, explaining that he thinks "the print medium in particular did focus on the politics, did tend to focus more on the arcane issues, the economic issues. Maybe the electronic medium was needed in reflecting some of the emotion that was described, some of the fear that was described."
There was an insatiable appetite for NAFTA news in Mexico, said Jose Carreno Figueras, Washington correspondent at El Universal, Mexico City.
"In the last three or four months, we were writing three and four stories of NAFTA a day around different aspects of NAFTA, with different statements, different points," he said. "At the end, it became a very confusing story because it was very difficult to sort through the amount of information that we were receiving."
In addition, Carreno explained, the Mexican media style is more declarative than explanatory.
"What is not stated by someone, what is not said by Mr. So-and-so or something like that is almost nonexistent. So there is very little space for analysis, very little space for what is the staple of American media ? what happened is this and this and you just add the quotes and the information to support the central story . . . .
"So I'll take my responsibility in the sense that we, I believe, that we did not do a good job about presenting NAFTA to the Mexican public."
Compounding the situation is the relatively small range of the Mexican print media. Carreno said there are about 20 publications in Mexico City that combined do not reach a million people.
"So we have very little penetration and very large interest, very large debate," he said.
Another factor was that for more than a century, Mexico "has felt very mixed feelings, to say the least, about the United States . . . . For 150 years, we have been a very insular country, and we find ourselves exposed and overexposed in the media in the United States. Our dirty laundry was being laundered outside the country. Not only inside but outside of the country. That has created a number of very uncomfortable situations inside Mexico."
Jessica Lee, senior Washington correspondent at USA Today, said one thing the press did well in its NAFTA coverage was "capture the tremendous amount of fear that there was surrounding this, especially among working people, blue-collar people and people who once worked and no longer work."
But the press did a disservice to those people with its NAFTA reporting, she added.
"When we talked about the benefits of NAFTA, those who talked about it were talking within business terms, in terms of markets, in terms of the jobs they believe that they can create and exports and that kind of thing," she said. "People who were against it were talking about jobs.
"Long-term benefits for markets are a luxury some people can't afford when they're thinking about short-term benefits like their paychecks," Lee said.
"I think we didn't capture that dimension of the NAFTA debate and how the fact that this factory might move an assembly operation to Mexico, what that means to the people who do the assembly here. Does that mean they're going to have to go to Mexico to continue to work? Does that mean they're going to have another job?
"We talked about this in terms of [worker] dislocation, not as much in terms of job loss, not as much in terms of people who might lose their homes, not as much in terms of people who need to be retrained," she said.
"I think that we did not explain enough of what would happen," Lee continued. "We talked about job dislocation. Worker dislocation is what we often said. That this means that people will lose jobs. Where will they go? What will they do? I don't think we explained that."
She further emphasized that "this is the climate that you're in, and we in the press have to understand that when people are afraid, it's not just for nothing."
"And that we need to explain, what's likely to happen and give both sides."