[stop-imf] D.C. Protests Bucking Media Spin (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

PROTESTS IN WASHINGTON CLASH WITH MEDIA SPIN

By Norman Solomon   /   Creators Syndicate


	Converging on the nation's capital this weekend, thousands of
protesters hope to do more than simply disrupt high-level meetings of the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Sunday and Monday.
Demonstrators are eager to help build a movement that can prevail over
those powerful institutions. But America's mainstream news outlets are
ill-positioned to shed much light on the underlying issues.

	The standard media lexicon is filled with buzzwords that snap
together as neatly as Leggo plastic blocks. Terms like "economic reform,"
"free markets" and "eliminating trade barriers" appear with such frequency
and assurance that they seem to be noting the only rational economic path
for less-developed countries. In reporting on the World Bank and the IMF,
as well as the kindred World Trade Organization, familiar media jargon has
long depicted the wisdom of their "reform" edicts as a no-brainer.

	What's implicit in a lot of news coverage often becomes explicit
in punditry. For example, when the nation's two biggest news weeklies
reported on the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle a few months
ago, the magazines only published fervent pro-WTO commentaries to put it
all in perspective. Newsweek's sole opinion piece on the subject came from
Fareed Zakaria, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, who decried "a
disparate and motley crew of protesters" while bemoaning "the carnival
tactics of a small but effective minority."

	Meanwhile, both of Time's commentaries lauded the WTO and
belittled the protesters. Under the headline "Return of the Luddites,"
Charles Krauthammer mocked what he called the "kooky crowd" protesting in
Seattle -- "one-world paranoids"; "apolitical Luddites, who refuse to
accept that growth, prosperity and upward living standards always entail
some dislocation"; and "the leftover left." Krauthammer's essay was
typeset around a photo of union activists protesting the WTO. The caption
repeated one of his epithets: "Kooky Crowd."

	That sort of media invective is in the cards for the April 16-17
demonstrations in Washington. Last Tuesday, as a warm-up, The Wall Street
Journal began its lead editorial with the declaration that protesters
"will be bringing their bibs and bottles to the nation's capital this week
to have a run at the annual spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank." In
the next sentence the newspaper labeled the array of expected protesters
"a smorgasbord of save-the-turtles activists, anarchists, egalitarians,
Luddites and Marxists."

	The editorial went on to describe the D.C. demonstrations as "an
anti-trade festival." It's a distortion that commonly makes its way into
news stories. But protesters taking to the streets against the IMF and
World Bank aren't opposed to "trade" any more than those who fought to
outlaw slavery were against work.

	"We are not against trade," says former Haitian president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "we are not against free trade, but our fear is
that the global market intends to annihilate our markets. We will be
pushed to the cities, to eat food grown on factory farms in distant
countries, food whose price depends on the daily numbers game" of the
global marketplace.

	In a book being published next week, "Eyes of the Heart," Aristide
explains that the austerity programs championed by the IMF and World Bank
offer "a choice between death and death" in poor countries. For instance:
"Haiti, under intense pressure from the international lending
institutions, stopped protecting its domestic agriculture while subsidies
to the U.S. rice industry increased. A hungry nation became hungrier."

	On a planet with half of the population -- 3 billion people --
living on less than two dollars a day, Aristide writes, "the statistics
that describe the accumulation of wealth in the world are mind-boggling.
... Behind this crisis of dollars there is a human crisis: among the poor,
immeasurable human suffering; among the others, the powerful, the policy
makers, a poverty of spirit which has made a religion of the market and
its invisible hand. A crisis of imagination so profound that the only
measure of value is profit, the only measure of human progress is economic
growth."

	Often, major U.S. media and foes of corporate globalization seem
to be speaking entirely different languages. Journalists and their usual
sources like to talk about "economic growth" and "opportunity." But the
protests in Washington are demanding "global justice."

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Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is "The Habits
of Highly Deceptive Media."