Strengthening trade coverage in the media: how can trade experts and journalists work together to make sense of global change?

• Date: 01 October 2006
• Author: Barnes, Jon
• Published date: 01 October 2006
• Author: Barnes, Jon

As world attention focuses on negotiations on the rules of international trade, one crucial aspect that remains largely ignored is the role of the media in both developed and developing countries in raising public awareness and debate about trade policy-making.

Coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and related trade issues in many developing country media is not only scant, but is often also marked by a "disconnect" in analysing the links between global decision-making and national policy formulation, and their implications for ordinary people.

Sketchy reporting

Although there is frequent coverage of the views of national traders' associations and other powerful domestic interests on trade rules, the voices of the poor and marginalized--small farmers, workers or women--rarely find a mention.

Media reporting also frequently examines trends in top-level negotiations without sufficiently analysing the underlying interests or substantive issues at stake. As with the lack of attention to the human impact of trade, some observers find this tendency in media in developed countries, too.

But it is journalists from developing countries, often under-supported and under-resourced, who face the most testing challenge of enlightening the public and bringing their views into a wider debate of trade policies.

Many of the world's poorest countries fail to send journalists to international trade negotiation meetings, either because of resource constraints or because they don't consider it a priority.

Panos trained 13 journalists from Asia and Africa to cover trade and development issues during WTO's 2005 Hong Kong ministerial conference and the 2006 suspension of its Doha trade talks (see http://www.panos.org. uk/tradingplaces).

Panos's aim was to help journalists cover trade developments in ways that would address some typical...