Vol. 17 No. 3 September 1996 Section 10 Page
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ThirdWorld Quarterly, Vol 17, No 3, pp 537± 556, 1996 `Covering’Latin America: the exclusivediscourse of The Summit of theAmericas (as viewed through the NewYork Times ) WALTERVANDERBUSH & THOMASKLAK Whenreviewing the history of US±Latin American relations, it iseasy todiscern ethnocentricityand a lackof self-critical re¯ ection in the US media representa- tionsof the people and nations south of the Rio Grande. Historians such as Johnsonand Black have shown how images of helplessness, corruption and inferioritywere widespread in portrayals of the region at times when such depictionserved certain US interests. 1 Chomskyand Herman have sustained the argumentthat news reporting in the1980s reinforced the Reagan White House’ s politicalslant on and agenda in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. 2 These importantinterrogations of the media’ s constructionof Latin American and Caribbeanreality in the past serve as areminderthat it is necessary tomaintain discriminatingvigilance in the present. Farmer doesso formore recent news reportingon Haiti 3,whileDalby’ s `reading’of the coverage of the Rio Summit exempli®es thatvigilance with regard to environmental issues, 4 andCroteau & Hoynesoffer a moregeneral critique of news reporting. 5 Webuildon theseauthors’ work while analysing the December 1994 Summit ofthe Americas as viewedthrough the ® lterof the NewYork Times . Our focus is primarilyon whatwe argueis incompletereporting. We refer toquestionsnot asked,assertions and assumptions not challenged, and views not articulated. By thenotion of `covering’ Latin America we refer tothe reporting bias achieved throughseveral rounds of exclusivity and exclusion. We argue that the Times coverageof the Summit of the Americas demonstrates a nearlyexclusive relianceon elite voices and a neartotal exclusion of oppositional ones. We detectthree types of oppositionalexclusion. Alternative or dissentingvoices are largelykept from de® ning the overall agenda (eg what should the summit address?),from being heard during the event so as todemonstrate its con- tentiousness(eg has neoliberalismhelped or hurt’ ? ShouldCuba have been excluded?),and from contesting elite assertions (eg does free tradereally promotedemocracy, and is itin everyone’ s bestinterest?). We follow analysis byHawk who, while noting similar exclusion in another Third World context, arguesthat `Africa is trulyª coveredºby the Western press inthe sense that importantstories go unreported’ . 6 WalterVanderbush and Thomas Klak are attheDepartment of PoliticalScience andDepartment of Geography respectively, MiamiUniversity, OxfordOH 45056,USA. 0143-6597/96/030537-20$6.00 Ó 1996Third World Quarterly WALTER VANDERBUSH &THOMAS KLAK Attheend of 1994national leaders from across theWestern Hemisphere came togetherfor the ® rst timesince 1967 to discuss theimportant issues facingthe Americas.James Brooke,the Times’dauntlesslypro-free trade reporter on Latin Americaneconomic trends, commented on 12 December that `[f]or the summit meeting,statisticians froze a frame inthe blur of United States exports and investmentspeeding south’ . LikeBrooke, we ® ndthe summit useful for retrospectivelyand prospectively assessing hemisphericrelations. However, we wishto broaden his concern for macroeconomics to include others such as jobs andwages, democracy and the environment, elite agendas, and the news media’ s rolein establishingwhat is important.We see thesummit and its news coverage as acrucialmoment in hemispheric relations that can reveal much about the distributionof power and the discourse of development. It reveals who gets to speak,who de® nes theagenda, how `reality’ is presented,and how non-elite voicesare marginalised. Itmight be expected that the ® rst suchmeeting of headsof state in morethan aquartercentury would produce an abundance of context setting and historical re¯ection, thorough reporting and careful analysis by US media. In fact, the coverageby major news sources inthat country was surprisinglylight, and extremelynarrow in terms ofissues, sources andperspectives. In the New York Times,widelyviewed as thenation’ s mostimportant newspaper, only two articlespreviewed the summit during the week before it took place. A single frontpage article only and one editorial throughout the two-week period around thesummit are furtherevidence of the meagre coverage. Those reports that actuallymade the Times lackedthe depth, history and range of perspectives to alloweven previously knowledgeable readers anopportunity to grasp the challengesfacing the region, or even to comprehend the events of those few days.In this argument, we follow a critiquemade by Dalby of the coverage of theRio Earth Summit for `explaining the story without examining complex contexts’ .7 Theincreasing complexity of theworld, particularly in the sphere of internationalpolitical economy, has leftcasual observers bewildered, and even theexperts regularly baf¯ ed, by thenew world order of derivatives,bailouts and worldtrade organisations. While the media is notresponsible for the complexity ofissues, itneedsto beheldresponsible when it doesnot live up toitsobligation toprovide suf® cientinformation for the news consumer to evaluate signi® cant eventsand act accordingly. Freetrade and media representations ofthe Third World Omissionoften produces the greatest bias in reporting about the Third World or USrelations with those nations. 8 Anexample of the omission problem today is providedby that which passes fordebate about neoliberalism in Latin America. Themedia give views of politicaland economic elite proponents disproportion- ateattention. As aresult,neoliberal assumptions, from the naturalness of `free trade’to the macro-level indicators to judge these policies, are rarelyinterro- gatedand challenged. At the same time,progress in implementing neoliberal economicpolicies becomes a preoccupationof regional assessments. Thediscussion before the signing of the North American Free TradeAgree- 538 `COVERING’ LATIN AMERICA ment (NAFTA) and GATT inthe USA demonstrates how accepting these neolib- eralassumptions creates obstaclesto challenging such trade agreements. The mantraof free trade,for example, holds that everyone ultimately bene® ts. Thatoft-repeated notion of long term bene® ts survivedvirtually unscathed duringthe US Congressional debates over both GATT and NAFTA, despite widespreadpublic reservations about the trade pacts. 9 Strategicquestions aboutappropriate timing and how to offset short-term costs borneby vulner- ablegroups were frequently raised. But note the difference between a debate overwhether we or they are nowready for free trade,and a deeperone about whethereliminating national constraints on investors and producers (and not onworkers) is initself a goodthing. If thediscussions in the US Congress andmedia begin from the assumption that restraints on trade and investment are unnaturalimpediments to the forward evolutionary progress toward greater competitionand universal bene® t, debate will be reduced to how and when to signon. The negotiations for GATT and NAFTA werecarried on in relative secrecy,protected by these assumptions of inevitability and by the complexity ofissues involvedin this increasingly mysti® cated globalisation of economics. As RalphNader depicts the process, once the agreement has beenhammered outbehind closed doors, citizens hear/ readonly `a sanitisedsummary suitably interpretedby the agreements’ boosters’ . 10 Oras LoriWallach explains, `[t]radeagreements are negotiatedin secret bygovernmental representatives workingclosely with corporate advisers and are enforcedthrough procedures hiddenfrom public scrutiny’ . 11 Inaddition to inhibiting informed debate over trade agreements by failing to providea windowto secret negotiationsand hidden procedures, unre¯ ective mediareinforce certain ideas by simply reiterating elite assertions. For the MiamiSummit, elite views embodied a numberof contentious assumptions aboutthe political economy of the Americas, but the NewYork Times , by merelyaccepting and repeating them, diminished the likelihood that they will bechallenged in the future. In the political sphere, for example, the oft-re- peatedtheme of a `universallydemocratic region’ serves toobscure cases such as Peru,Guatemala, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, whose political systems wouldmost likely not be so labelledafter close scrutiny. Also, the assumptionsabout Cuba as theregion’ s singularpariah are similarlyrepeated untilwe are ledto believe that throughout the Americas, the only disagree- mentsabout Cuba concern the most appropriate strategy to transform its government:by what means wouldthat polity best be democratised? Inthe case ofthe Summit of the Americas, we detect two layers of elite screening.First, the meeting attenders were representatives of high politics, whowere able to exclude certain voices systematically. Second, in its report- ing, the Times neitheracknowledged that exclusion nor gave voice to those outsidethe of® cial list of invitees. Instead, the newspaper drew opinion heav- ilyfrom Washington insiders and Latin leaders who comprise part of `the Washingtonconsensus’ on free-market reform. 12 Theproblem with such ex- clusionis notedby Croteau and Hoynes, who argue that `healthy news media shouldexhibit a rangeof perspectives on any given issue representingvarious 13 sectors ofsociety and various explicit political positions’ . The Times cover- 539 WALTER VANDERBUSH &THOMAS KLAK ageof thesummit illustrates the media’ s tendencyto reiterate the views of those