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In December 1994, only eleven months after NAFTA went into effect, Mexico suffered a major financial crisis, including a massive flight of capital, a devaluation of the currency, and a subsequent bailout by the IMF that required Mexico to carry out painful deflationary measures. Despite the fact that the meltdown occurred within a year of the introduction of NAFTA, which the media had portrayed as ushering in a prospective golden age of economic advance, they were unanimous that NAFTA was not to blame. And in virtual lock-step they supported the Mexican (investor) bailout, despite poll reports of general public opposition in the United States. Experts and media pundits and editorialists repeatedly explained that one great merit of NAFTA was that it had “locked Mexico in” so that it couldn’t alter its overall policy direction or resort to controls to protect itself from severe deflation and unemployment. They were oblivious to the profoundly undemocratic nature of this lock-in, made more questionable by the fact that it had been negotiated by a Mexican government that ruled as a result of electoral fraud.110

More recently, when the growing global opposition to the policies of the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank led to mass protests at the WTO conference in Seattle in November and December 1999, and then at the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in April 2000, media coverage of these events was derisive and hostile to the protesters and almost uniformly failed to deal with the substantive issues that drove the protests. The media portrayed the Seattle protesters as “allpurpose agitators” (U.S. News & World Report), “terminally aggrieved” (Philadelphia Inquirer), simply “against world trade” (ABC News), and making “much ado about nothing” (CNN), but the bases of the protesters’ grievances were almost entirely unexplored.111 Similarly, in the case of the Washington, D.C., protests, the media repeatedly reported on activists’ attire, looks, body odors, fadism, and claimed a lack of “anything that can coherently be called a cause” (Michael Kelly, journalist, Washington Post), and they continued their refusal to address issues.112 There were many informed protesters with coherent agendas at Seattle and Washington—including reputable economists, social theorists, and veteran organizers from around the world113—but the media did not seek them out, preferring to stereotype antiglobalization activists as ignorant troublemakers. On op-ed pages, there was a major imbalance hostile to the protesters. TV bias was at least as great, and often misleading on the facts. In his November 29,1999, backgrounder on the WTO, Dan Rather explained that the organization had ruled on many environmental issues, implying that those rulings were protective of the environment when in fact they generally privileged trade rights over environmental needs.

Another notable feature of media reporting on both the Seattle and Washington, D.C., protests, and a throwback to their biased treatment of the protests of the Vietnam War era (1965–75),114 was their exaggeration of protester violence, their downplaying of police provocations and violence, and their complaisance at illegal police tactics designed to limit all protestor actions, peaceable or otherwise.115 Although the Seattle police resorted to force and used chemical agents against many nonviolent protesters well before a handful of individuals began breaking windows, both then and later the media reversed this chronology, stating that the police violence was a response to protester violence. In fact, the vandals were largely ignored by the police, while peaceful protesters were targeted for beatings, tear gas, torture with pepper spray, and arrest.116 One New York Times article went so far as to claim that the Seattle protesters had thrown excrement, rocks, and Molotov cocktails at delegates and police officers; the Times later issued a correction acknowledging that these claims were false.117 Dan Rather, who had falsely alleged that