A New York Times story today (10/28/11) by Jennifer Steinhauer on the state of bipartisanship in Washington noted:

Outside of a few recent flashes of light--the passage of three trade bills this month, and an agreement on patent reform--there have been no big bipartisan jobs initiatives in this Congress.

The idea that trade deals with Colombia and South Korea are "big" job creators is not a fact--it's an argument that proponents of the deals make. But a corporate media that gives a thumbs-up to anything labeled "free trade" are going to be just as eager to call these deals job creators.

As Janine Jackson noted in a recent article in Extra!, the media didn't seem interested in evaluating the job creation numbers peddled by the deal's promoters, who were claiming 70,000 jobs would be created by the Korea agreement. According to Public Citizen, the deal could result in a net loss of jobs.

The story with patent reform is similar--lawmakers make spectacular claims about the jobs that are going to be created, while critics suggest the effect will be minor.

Corporate media's incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called "free trade" deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable.

What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: "The production of shirts and sheets has shifted steadily from the United States to countries with lower-cost labor. Economists argue that this process strengthens the economy as companies and workers shift to more productive and lucrative kinds of work." Of course, if the Times has evidence of laid off textile workers' mass movement to more lucrative work, they're sitting on the scoop of the century.

Elite media's presentation of deals like those just passed with South Korea, Colombia and Panama consists of a barrage of unchecked claims: This time around, those featured funny numbers from proponents, who spoke of increased export growth without talking about imports--kind of like giving half a baseball score--and misleading context, like setting the deals within a storyline about jobs when there's no evidence such deals promote them.

Then you get a line, like that in the October 13 New York Times, once the deals have passed and been heralded as a "rare moment of bipartisan accord," that "the passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small."

Some would call that bait and switch. For the corporate press on trade deals, it's standard operating procedure.

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer takes a look (8/26/11) at U.S. trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that are currently languishing in Congress. The piece calls them "free-trade" agreements, which is generally misleading: Trade deals usually involve complicated horse-trade negotiations regarding tariffs, patent protection and the like--meaning they make trade in some ways less free.

But more important are the other assumptions in the piece:

The three free-trade agreements, which originated with the Bush administration, would eliminate tariffs on cross-border transactions, expanding exports of American goods by about $12 billion a year, according to estimates by the United States International Trade Commission. Under the agreements, American service providers would be able to compete in the three countries, ostensibly adding new jobs to the American economy. Because of this, they are widely supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business trade groups.

First is the assumption that these deals do something special to increase U.S. exports. A study from Public Citizen last year found more export growth to countries that don't have "free trade" agreements with the United States.  (Todd Tucker joined us on CounterSpin to talk about it at the time.) And the estimates of export growth haven been called into question as well.

"Ostensibly adding new jobs to the American economy" seems like a rather generous leap of faith.  Critics have consistently argued that these deals will cost jobs-- even the New York Times concluded last year that the Korea pact "is likely to result in little if any net job creation in the short run, according to the government's own analysis."

Lastly--is there any reason to suspect that the "U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business trade groups" support these trade deals because they create U.S. jobs? As Dean Baker put it:

Corporations do not exist to create jobs, nor do they claim this as a goal. Invariably, corporate CEOs will say that their responsibility is to produce returns for shareholders as they announce large layoffs. If the Chamber of Commerce is supporting these deals, it is because it believes that they will increase profits, end of story.

The Washington Post's latest attack on Venezuela comes in an editorial headlined: "Colombia Proves Again That Venezuela Is Harboring FARC Terrorists."

The editors don't say why a point already proved needs be proved again, but before offering the new evidence, they recount the old claim that laptops captured by Colombia from FARC guerrillas have clearly established links between the Venezuelan government and  the FARC:

That Venezuela is backing a terrorist movement against a neighboring democratic government has been beyond dispute since at least 2008, when Colombia recovered laptops from a FARC camp in Ecuador containing extensive documentation of Mr. Chávez's political and material support.

The alleged FARC laptop evidence certainly is in dispute. (On March 11 of this year, Gen. Doug Fraser, head of U.S. Southern Command, testified before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that he knew of no official Venezuela/FARC links--"We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection"--before retracting his statement a day later after an apparent trip to the woodshed.)

The new evidence? The Post cites a presentation to the Organization of American States (OAS) by Colombia's ambassador to that body, who said he could pinpoint the locations of 75 FARC camps within Venezuela, and then offered up more concrete evidence in the form of photos and videos.  Brace yourselves: The single piece of such evidence the Post editors chose to describe was a photo of a man purported to be a top commander in the ELN--which is not the FARC, but a smaller Colombian guerrilla group--"sipping Venezuelan beer on a popular Venezuelan beach." So a photo of an alleged official of a different organization drinking beer in (allegedly) Venezuela is proof that Hugo Chavez' government is working with the FARC?

The last time the media pushed allegations (Washington Post, 2/5/03) that an official U.S. enemy (then, Saddam Hussein) was harboring a terrorist leader (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), it turned out to be a bogus claim (Washington Post, 4/6/07) that played a crucial role in tricking the nation into war.

Newsweek's right-wing Latin American correspondent Mac Margolis (7/2/10) is once again playing games with statistics. After the obligatory attack on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez as a "chest-thumping autocrat," Margolis gets down to the business of praising his favorite Latin American country, Colombia, as a country that deserves "lead billing" among the "new stars of the emerging markets":

In the past eight years, the Andean nation has gone from dud to dynamo: foreign investment has risen 250 percent. Its stock index is up 15 percent this year, and 35 percent (versus Brazil's 14 percent) over the decade.

Since Margolis makes the comparison between Colombia and Brazil, let's look at a more meaningful one: In 2000, per capita GDP in Colombia was $6,200, and Brazil's was $6,150 (figures adjusted for purchasing power). In 2009, the last year available, Colombia's was $8,200, and Brazil's was $9,400. So Brazilians, who started the century just slightly behind Colombia in economic output, are now 13 percent ahead--regardless of how well those nations' stock investors are doing.

On top of that, Colombia is "the only major country in Latin America in which the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent years," as the Washington Post's Juan Forero (4/19/10) reported, citing the U.N. Economic Commission on Latin America. Twenty-three percent of Colombians live in extreme poverty, versus 7 percent of Brazilians, according to the UN.

It seems that Margolis picks his "duds" and "dynamos" based on ideology, not economics.

Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn "is the Wall Street Journal's 'Microtrend'-spotting columnist" and "also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller," Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that "only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter."

Alas, "Scumbag spotted!" is Nolan's cry when writing that

Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) "Microtrend" column is about "glamping"--glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients.

Nolan goes on to remind us that "Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position." It's particularly interesting to recall that scandal as "a story that the WSJ broke," considering how, as Nolan puts it, "moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician," but "now he's screwing a newspaper the same way."

NACLA has Latin America writer Daniel Denvir's review (5/11/09) of a new Bart Jones biography of Hugo Chávez. In it, Denvir's reasons for having "never been a big reader of biographies"--"the product of our most unfortunate and idol-indulging tendencies"--give way to the fact that some leaders' "images become proxies for larger ideological, social and cultural debates--often to the point of caricature." Denvir's contention that "a good biography can take on this echo chamber residuum and tell a more reality-based story" becomes that much more urgent when, "in the case of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, this is a politically necessary task":

The New York Times editorial board claims Chávez aids guerrillas. Ethically challenged televangelist Pat Robertson called for his assassination. And when talking heads aren't calling him a terrorist, they take up the Venezuelan right wing’s cartoonish image of Chávez as hyperbolic and verbose buffoon. Admittedly, recent conservative attempts to provoke hysteria over the Chávez-Obama handshake at the Summit of the Americas seem to have fallen flat.

The Jones book crucially "takes on mainstream media coverage of Chávez and explains the Bolivarian Revolution's victories--and thus its high level of public support" while it also "acknowledges that Chávez is a leader with serious faults... but methodically knocks down the charge that he is a dictator." Denvir further notes that "conservative talk radio and mainstream media have eagerly spilled copious ink cataloguing Chávez's sins. Meanwhile, far less attention is given to President Álvaro Uribe and the Colombian political establishment's ties to right-wing paramilitaries, who actually kill their political opponents," and suggests that "a comparative Lexis-Nexis study on the subject would be enlightening." Well... see Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall