A slow but perceptible sea-change is under way in the American media, with even the network anchors now and then reading an item critical of the administration.
More important is what’s happening in the New York Times; wherever it goes, the anchormen and the wire services are emboldened to follow. Eventually, with sufficient repetition, a fact or two about the present plight of our country may yet seep into public consciousness.
During the Clinton years, the Times shamed itself by pursuing the president for inconsequential matters and by praising him for such things as welfare “reform” and NAFTA.
But now we are beginning to see in its coverage unmistakable signs of skepticism about the imperial dreams, economic program, and foreign policy of Clinton’s successor.
For instance on Sunday the paper ran an enormously long editorial — apparently the first in a series called “Harvesting Poverty” — about how “free trade” policies are driving the Philippines deeper into poverty. (The italics are because, as the author points out, we have rigged international commerce so that it isn’t free at all.)
The second in the series, called “The Great Catfish War,” ran yesterday. It’s about how we’re working the same cruel scam on Vietnamese fishermen. These long essays combine reporting with opinion in a way unusual for newspaper editorials. I commend them to you.
I recall plowing through the similarly long articles the Times used to run as Clinton was slipping NAFTA past us rubes. The treaty’s supporters, seldom challenged in the paper’s pages, argued that one of its principal aims was to raise wages abroad so they would one day match ours.
This preposterous claim ran counter to common sense as well as to all previous human experience. But the only people to point that out were Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and die-hard lefties like me who were somewhat surprised at the company we suddenly found ourselves keeping.
All of us were treated by the Times and the rest of the journalistic establishment as foolish children who had no business at the big table with the grown-ups. I don’t know about Perot and Buchanan, but I’m delighted to see the Times coming over to our little table and sitting down at last.
(Addendum: the same day as the catfish editorial/story, the Times ran an article on IBM’s plans to shift three million white-collar jobs overseas by 2015. America’s blue-collar jobs were the first to go; now it’s the turn of our middle class. Only an economic moron — and there’s no shortage of those in the White House — could believe that a country composed only of millionaires and their servants could have a prosperous future.)
Posted by Jerome Doolittle at July 23, 2003 11:25 AM
I noticed that a headline about Jessica Lynch's homecoming said something like "Lynch Returns Home
Following Media Hype," and thought gee, that's unusual to see in the mainstream press... so I think you may be right about some sort of sea-change in the popular media... an effect of the Internet perhaps?
Thanks for the links! Just a small correction for the opinion piece from Sunday:
This is the right URL.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/opinion/20SUN1.html
Posted by: Franz Fuchs on July 23, 2003 2:44 PMAnd thanks for the correction, which I've just made. And sorry about the typo.
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on July 23, 2003 5:23 PMYou are right about the job drain. And also right to point to the IBM story. The job drain is starting to spread from manufacturing into services.
You probably noticed a few stories in the Times in the past few months about how if you call up a corporate help line, such as HMO or credit card, your call is now as likely to be handled in India as Indiana. And, the big tax boys like H&R Block are having Indians do U.S. tax returns. The work is just as good as we can do it, and much cheaper.
If we ship the manufacturing stuff abroad, and now we are shipping the cubicle stuff abroad ... what work are we going to be able do?
Posted by: No. 2 on July 23, 2003 7:00 PMThese people never learn. And we pay for it.
As the marriage counselor said to me and my bickering wife-of-the-moment: "If it weren't so serious, it would be funny!"
During the campaign against NAFTA and WTO and GATT, etc., the strongest online proponents (libertarians who had pulled themselves up to the middle of the bubble by their own bootstraps -- NOT! (sssh don't mention ARPA to them)) of "free" trade (i.e., that great sucking sound as manufacturing jobs slipped south of the border and elsewhere overseas) are now able to pat themselves on the back as they stand in the unemployment line.