Portfolio at NYU

Posted 03.31.03
News coverage of the WTO's Doha Ministerial Meeting: reporting globalization

By Mike Woodsworth

As delegates from 143 countries prepared for the Fourth Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Doha from November 9 to 14, globalization watchers in both the pro- and contra-WTO camps were predicting that the meeting would play a crucial role in determining the future shape of the world economic system. The WTO's 1999 Seattle summit had collapsed in part because the US and Europe refused to modify what many poor countries perceived as unfair trade rules. To some, imbalances of power within the WTO symbolized a flawed global trading system which has actually accelerated the gulf between rich and poor over the last twenty years. It appeared that a failure to achieve a workable and fair consensus at Doha would deal a significant blow to the WTO's credibility and perhaps even lead to its dissolution. On the other hand, a new agreement might pave the way for a "development round," which the WTO claims would focus on alleviating global poverty.

Despite Doha's importance, American news media devoted very little attention to the meeting or to the significant economic and political debates centered around globalization. With the notable exception of The New York Times, American newspapers provided only skeletal analysis of the summit's major points of contention. Developing countries' complaints about the inequities of the global trading system, focused mostly on drug patents, European farm subsidies, and American anti-dumping laws, barely registered on the American public's radar screen.

Globalization summits since "The Battle of Seattle" have become huge media events, whenever noisy protests and street battles erupt; at Doha however, the authoritarian Qatari regime kept protests to a minimum. In the absence of physical confrontations making headline news, the media should have delved into more complex issues, but instead largely fell silent.

Does this mean that trade-oriented meetings, despite their far-reaching consequences, are only judged newsworthy when violence occurs? If so, what does this say about journalism's ability or desire to explore the complicated terrain of globalization? What are the major difficulties for journalists who attempt to cover globalization and the summits that chart its course? How can the press escape from skewed coverage, and explain difficult material in a more critical, useful, and interesting manner?

These questions will be analyzed in this paper by comparing the coverage of the Doha Ministerial with coverage of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington in April 2000, focusing particularly on The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

In the weeks leading up to Doha, the war on terrorism monopolized news. After September 11, American newspapers began devoting considerable space to international news, focusing on other countries' reactions to terrorism and the war. International events that could be tied in with the war on terrorism, such as the attack on the Kashmiri state parliament, received special attention.

Coverage of the lead-up to Doha exhibited a similar tendency. Most articles focused on the perceived security risks of holding the summit in the Persian Gulf. Despite WTO chief Mike Moore's announcement on October 22 that the meeting would proceed as scheduled, newspapers continued to hype the security threat.

The New York Times ran relatively short pieces on October 15, 17, 19, and two on the 23rd about the possibility that the summit would move to Singapore. The only other WTO-related article to appear in the Times during that period was an October 18 piece examining the consequences of China's recent accession to the WTO.

On November 7, USA Today ran a 1911-word article by James Cox entitled "WTO meeting shrinks amid attack fears, feuds." Cox led by explaining that "the out-of-the-way desert kingdom of Qatar" had initially been chosen for the summit because its remoteness would preclude major protests, but that it no longer seemed like a "tranquil oasis," due to the terrorist "threat." Though the opening paragraphs deal with security issues, the article that follows focuses mostly on issues of trade, with security concerns briefly examined much further down in the piece. That the lead would focus on terrorism instead of the article's main topic —trade— suggests that USA Today judged their readers to be terrorism-obsessed and uninterested in the real issues related to the talks.

The Doha summit occurred simultaneously with two major news events, the Flight 587 crash in Queens and the fall of Kabul. These helped overshadow the meetings, especially in New York. Indeed, a Lexis search revealed that neither the Daily News nor the Post, both obsessed by the plane crash and the war in Afghanistan, even mentioned Doha at any time. Newsday ran an average of one story a day about the WTO meetings between November 9-16.

The Times stretched its coverage of Doha over a longer period, from mid-October to late November. In total, the Times ran 16 news stories, 1 op-ed column, and 3 editorials about the WTO and related issues. Six of the stories focused almost exclusively on security issues.

The Washington Post devoted 5 news stories, 2 op-Ed pieces and 3 editorials to the Doha summit. Two of these stories dealt exclusively with perceived security threats at the meetings.

The Los Angeles Times ran only 5 news pieces about the Doha meetings and 2 editorials.

This skimpy coverage resulted to some degree from the primacy of war and terrorism in American public discourse; furthermore, the Doha meetings might have seemed less relevant because the average citizen couldn't find Qatar on the map. However, an examination of the three papers' treatment of the World Bank/IMF meetings in Washington in April 2000 shows that more coverage doesn't necessarily result in deeper analysis.

All three papers devoted considerably more ink to the Washington meetings which, unlike the Doha summit, were met with considerable protests. Though the protests were not of the magnitude or violence of the Seattle action the previous fall, police nonetheless arrested over 1000 demonstrators.

From March 31 to May 7, 2000, The New York Times ran 20 news stories about the meetings and protests, 8 columns, and one editorial. Most of these were concentrated during the days immediately before and after the April 16 meetings. The other New York papers ran multiple pieces about the Washington meetings and the L.A. Times devoted 10 news stories and 4 op-ed pieces to the meetings, considerably more than at Doha.

However, a large proportion of this coverage dealt primarily with the clashes between protestors against police, while largely ignoring the ramifications of globalization.

For example, in an April 18, 2000 article, the L.A. Times' headline was "Financial Leaders Move on Aids, Debt Relief." But the first six graphs of the story focused on the confrontation between protestors and police, and the next four graphs described the reactions of IMF delegates to the protests outside. Only in the second section of the article did the focus turn to the issues of debt relief and AIDS. This pattern is not dissimilar from the USA Today's approach to the Doha summit, mentioned above: immediate concerns were allowed to obscure the more fundamental issues at play.

The Washington Post, unsurprisingly, devoted intense coverage to the Washington meetings, the protests and their effects on the city. From March 15 to May 1, 2000, the Post ran over 100 pieces; from April 11 to April 18, the Post published at least 4 pieces about the meetings and protests each day, peaking at 15 on April 17. In other words, the Post devoted 50% more pieces in a single day to the World Bank/IMF summit than to its entire Doha coverage.

During the meetings, The Post's news stories focused more on protest tactics and police reactions than on decisions being made within the meetings. In the preceding days the Post had explored the protest movement and its ideas from many different vantage points, making clear the distinctions between different tactics of direct action. Furthermore, a healthy debate about the successes and failures of the World Bank took place on the Post's op-ed page, featuring pieces by then-secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, and Juliette Beck, a prominent protest leader. An article by John Burgess on April 18, "A Debate Enriched By Talk of Poverty," recognized that "by grabbing media attention, the protestors managed to put before a broader public a debate that had been proceeding for years among an international elite of academics, policymakers and labor leaders."

The breadth of the Post's coverage was exceptional, as was the Washington Times' during the same period. This is understandable, in light of the proximity of the meetings and city residents' concerns about the sudden influx of protestors. However, American newspapers outside D.C. did not provide considerably more in-depth critical analysis of globalization than they did at Doha.

If a globalization summit conducted in the nation's capital in peacetime was not significantly more reported than the recent WTO meetings, then neither the historical circumstances of Doha, nor its geographic location can fully explain its minimal coverage in the American media.

Generally, news media have dedicated disproportionate coverage to the radical fringes of the anti-globalization movement that espouse street violence. While the vast majority of protestors march peacefully, their views drown beneath images of broken store windows and anarchist graffiti. Television news has been especially guilty of allowing tear gas, rubber bullets and flying bricks to overshadow more meaningful content. In short, the media have frequently trivialized the protest movement's various ideologies, demands and alternative policies.

By the same token, the policy decisions coming out of the meetings themselves have also received little real scrutiny. Newspaper articles typically lead with the violence and take the reader behind police lines later in the story. Rarely do they analyze what the meetings discussed. Similarly, television broadcasts lead with footage of street fighting, followed by stale posed shots of world leaders shaking hands.

Such glaring over-simplifications make it easy to accuse the media of failing to educate the public about the ramifications of globalization; however, one must recognize several major difficulties in covering headline events such as Doha and the trends they imply.

First, the Doha summit was but one event — albeit a potential turning point — in a developing trend of trade liberalization. Doha's newsworthiness pertains less to the negotiations themselves than to the long-term significance of the agreements they lead to. This challenges journalists with a series of paradoxical tasks: covering a process with unknown results, assessing the significance of negotiations leading to agreements that merely establish templates for further negotiations, and placing a range of localized issues within a global context. Facing these challenges requires expertise, research, in-depth analysis, and considerable time and space. It also requires journalists and readers alike to acknowledge that no clear story will necessarily emerge at first glance.

A second difficulty is that summit meetings produce few readily packaged soundbites or stories. Documents such as Doha's Ministerial Declaration are drafted in dense bureaucratese that obscures clarity, with continual references to specific articles of past agreements. Statements of intent produced by the WTO use subtle linguistic devices that lend themselves to a variety of divergent interpretations. Minor semantic variations can mean the difference between mandatory action and continued avoidance of sensitive issues. With consensus at the core of the WTO decision-making process, delegates engage in all-night sessions haggling over specific terms until the language becomes sufficiently obtuse to accommodate everybody's interpretation.

The convoluted agreements that emerge, like the pseudo-rational jargon of government bureaucracies, are a form of secrecy in that they exclude non-experts and alienate members of the public who attempt to understand. For journalists seeking to extricate the core information from such documents and to make it intelligible to the average citizen, the task might seem overwhelming.

A natural response to the dense language and dull conference-room negotiations is to turn instead to boisterous protestors marching with banners and life-size puppets and chanting slogans outside the summits. They make for sexier news. When protestors turn violent in response to police brutality, this in turn makes for even flashier news than peaceful marches.

The protestors themselves are the source of a third difficulty for journalists. The anti-globalization movement is neither uniformly opposed to globalization, nor is it cohesive. It boasts no recognizable charismatic leaders, and most protestors themselves would find it difficult to articulate more than a couple of core beliefs universally shared within the movement. While anti-state extremists encourage protestors to communicate their anger through destruction, moderates tackle the intricacies of globalization in language almost as complex as that being used within conference rooms.

Because of globalization's necessarily vast scope, almost any critique can marshal statistics and case studies to back it up. Journalists need not venture into the minefield of evaluating all economic analysis, but they must acknowledge that alternative interpretations exist and that they are not all premised on throwing rocks through store windows. In analyzing these alternatives, journalists must also recognize that traditional right vs. left definitions have lost their relevance.

These three difficulties have contributed to journalists' tendency to downplay the substance of globalization summits, with the unfortunate consequence of withholding important information from citizens. However, various approaches have countered this disturbing trend and could be adopted more widely.

First, op-ed pieces written by experts in the field provide valuable insights that a reporter might not be able to extract from complicated subject matter. In anticipation of Doha, the Open Democracy website provided a very interesting and enlightening discussion of globalization, approaching diverse issues from a wide variety of perspectives. To feature such an extensive debate might be difficult for mainstream newspapers, but they could adopt a similar approach by fitting opinion articles into an ongoing discussion over time, as with The Washington Post's coverage of the 2000 World Bank/IMF meetings.

Second, newspapers should report more consistently about communities abroad and seek out people whose lives have been directly touched by globalization's effects. This may seem a difficult task for a journalist and expensive for media businesses. However, the dissemination of such information is in the public interest, and could also interest the public by helping to answer some fundamental questions. If Doha's success was truly a pivotal moment after Seattle's failure, why was this so? If globalization affects lives, then what lives have been touched because the Seattle talks collapsed? How do real people suffer and prosper as a result of free trade? After the Uruguay round of trade talks widened the gap between the world's poorest and richest, the WTO has recently become conscious of the need to help its poorest members. The voices of these poor members could and should be heard in our mainstream press.

For example, in the month following the World Bank/ IMF meetings in Washington, major US newspapers devoted considerable coverage to a proposed oil pipeline in Chad. On May 28, 2000, the Los Angeles Times wrote the following about "one of the largest, most contentious African development projects in recent memory:

"The project has turned into a referendum on the World Bank's role in poor countries. Is it a Trojan Horse for greedy capitalists and environmental outlaws, or the world's best hope for responsible development that can lift millions out of poverty? The question isn't new, but the street protests and public recriminations are. Like the IMF after the Asia economic crisis, the World Bank has come under a harsh spotlight as doubts are raised about the effects of globalization on poor nations and the environment."

The article shows that, despite the L.A. Times' relative silence on the substantive issues of the World Bank's April meeting, its journalists had decided to start paying attention to its projects. Because of "public recriminations," they promised more careful analysis of World Bank projects and how they affect lives.

Third, this case-study approach would gain further coherence when combined with more consistent analysis of globalization's broader trends. Because of current patterns of news coverage, globalization and the protests it provokes strike most citizens as disconnected from the realities of daily North American life. Complex issues are mentioned whenever the news media flock to cover a summit and its opponents, but all analysis then disappears until the next summit occurs months later. Given this pattern, building interest and understanding in the human dimensions of globalization becomes difficult.

The Economist's survey of technology and development in their November 10 issue explained globalization in light of worldwide trends such as health, nutrition, the internet, and the spread of democracy. By examining particular trends as well as examples from the village level, the articles deftly supported the magazine's broad view that globalization creates positive change. The simple and user-friendly expose, while written for a specialized magazine with a definite ideological slant, could be easily adapted into a newspaper format, and could easily be applied to proving different theses about the world economy.

Newspaper bosses might argue that in-depth coverage of globalization would prove expensive and impractical. On the other hand, the internet provides resources from a wide variety of information-rich sources. Each newspaper could hire one full-time researcher to investigate globalization and its effects, come up with story ideas, and then send well-briefed reporters to specific places.

Fourth, the voices of protest must also be heard and explained in a more complete and honest way. Rather than sweeping generalizations which trivialize and misrepresent protest thought, newspapers should make efforts to explain the intricacies and variations of the movement. The New York Times, recognizing the degree of public ignorance about the anti-globalization movement, produced a 2900 word feature by Leslie Wayne on October 29 entitled "For Trade Protestors, 'Slower, Sadder Songs'" that began:

"To many, the anti-globalization movement has been a bit of a puzzle since it first appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Who are these people? Where did they come from? How are they financed? How are they organized? What do they want?"

These simple "5 W" questions were not answered by applying wide generalizations to the entire movement, but by focusing on certain important voices. A sidebar examined some of the major groups in the American anti-globalization movement, such as the Ruckuss Society, Global Exchange and the Institute For Policy Studies, detailing their sources of funding and activities.

Fifth, newspapers could make debates accessible and interesting to readers by explaining global issues in light of local problems. For example, during the Doha meetings, American newspapers framed the drug patent issue in terms of the domestic debate about Cipro. With an American public newly aware of the repercussions of patents at home, The New York Times devoted 5 articles and an editorial to the urgent drug patent dispute at Doha. On November 11, the Times ran a 3124 word article detailing the history of intellectual property rights in the US, which provided a useful framework for understanding proposed solutions to the African AIDS crisis. Overall, the depth of the Times' coverage set a decent example for future coverage.

Newspapers should raise awareness about global issues by linking them to domestic concerns. A familiar post-September 11 analysis of the roots of terrorism attributed militant Islam's appeal to the brutal poverty its converts arise from. While this argument has its flaws — in following its line of reasoning, Ethiopians would be more prolific terrorists than Saudis — poverty does play a crucial role in political upheavals of all kinds throughout the world. It is unfortunate that such an equation is needed to stir the citizens of affluent societies into awareness about suffering abroad, but at least poverty now seems to have gained a certain urgency because of its perceived links to combating terrorism. By calling for a new "development round" at Doha, the WTO claimed to offer an escape from the cycles of poverty, desperation and violence that afflict many developing countries. Coverage of the Doha summit could thus have tied into the war on terrorism, not merely because of immediate worries such as security concerns or the Cipro debate. A much broader analysis would have been called for.

Broadening even further, a new trade round will probably accelerate global warming and over-consumption of the world's finite resources. The WTO has adamantly refused to take global warming seriously, addressing environmental concerns at Doha in the vaguest of terms. Whereas the infamous sea turtles at Seattle pushed environmental activists into headlines, environmental issues disappeared from mainstream newspapers at Doha because of protestors' absence. Environmental damage is a serious and urgent reality that most of the world's powerful economic actors refuse to discuss in good faith. The media, possessors of agenda-making power, should point this out, despite the political volatility of such accusations.

Doha was a significant moment in one of the defining global trends of our time, and news media should have encouraged discussion and re-evaluations of globalization, even if the meetings themselves possessed little "breaking news" value in a post-September 11 terrorism-obsessed culture. In such circumstances, journalism needs to play the role envisaged by Walter Lippman, by widening of the scope of coverage into areas ignored in conventional political discourse and thus providing normative guidelines for public debate.