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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: WTO Coverage: Prattle in Seattle As an estimated 50,000 protesters rallied in Seattle to shut down the opening conference of the World Trade Organization meeting last week, mainstream media treated protesters' concerns with indifference and often contempt. That hostility translated into slanted coverage of both the demonstrations and the police reaction. In mainstream reports, "anti-trade" became a common--though wildly inaccurate--label for the demonstrators. "A guerrilla army of anti-trade activists took control of downtown Seattle today," a Washington Post article (12/1/99) began. ABC News reporter John Cochran (11/30/99) said Seattle had become a "home for protests against world trade." ABC anchor Jack Ford (12/1/99) pitted the demonstrators against the city hosting them: "No American city exports as much, President Clinton was happy to point out today, which helps explain why a good many people in Seattle are angry--at the protesters and their very anti-trade message." Even coverage that did attempt to describe the protesters' goals dealt with them in only the vaguest terms--and often at a level of generalization that rendered the descriptions inaccurate or meaningless. An ABC News story by correspondent Deborah Wang in Seattle failed to address the activists' concerns with anything more than platitudes: "They are fighting for essentially the same issues they campaigned against in the '60's. Corporations, which they say are still exploiting workers in the Third World. Agribusiness is still putting small farmers out of work. Mining companies, still displacing peasants from the land…. But what is different is that, for these protesters, this single organization, the WTO has come to symbolize about all that is wrong in the modern world." To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1822 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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