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CHAPTER 14 Trade Policy and the Media-Part I Joe H. Stroud I chose nearly four decades ago to be a journalist, rather than to continue with graduate school and become a history teacher, because I wanted to be a generalist . Have I ever been a generalist! I do care about trade and the making of trade policy, but I must say it's hard work to do an intellectually respectable job of keeping up with it, translating it into understandable terms and yet not clouding important issues of public policy. To understand what we do, and to understand what we have to do, let me share one bit of perspective. One of my favorite correspondents-a federal judge who is a frustrated newspaper editor-once sent me a tearsheet of an editorial on a Supreme Court decision with a message scrawled across the top. The message said, "You have greatly oversimplified this issue." I couldn't resist writing back to him the following letter: "Dear Judge Cohn: It is the business of journalists to oversimplify what lawyers and judges overcomplicate." To some extent that describes our role as it relates to even important issues of public policy. We are inherently oversimplifiers, who are trying to describe complex matters in ways that are readily understandable. When I meet for dinner once a month or so with Bob Stern and his colleagues to hear discussions of trade issues, that's what I'm struggling to do. I need to keep trying to understand the seemingly arcane issues of trade policy in the hope that I can translate them for myself, my staff and the public. My concern about interpreting trade issues arises in part from my graduate studies. I've also had enough economics to carry with me an abiding conviction that the more or less rational allocation of resources, goods and services is essential to the efficient functioning of human society. That has led me to the belief that a relatively open trading system is important to our society and to international relations. That's been reinforced through a good bit of travel, and particularly from seeing what closed trading systems did to societies such as Argentina and South Africa, and through exposure to the Detroit business community, which necessarily operates in world markets but sometimes still carries with it the attitudes of people who operated under the protection of a cartel during many of their formative years. Detroit has sometimes been a tough place to write about trade policy, because of the abiding conviction of many in our principal industry that trade was in fact the source of much of the 300 Constituent Interests and U.S. Trade Policies present danger to "our way of life." It's easier now, after the NAFfA and GAIT fights, to talk about the advantages of maintaining a relatively open trading system, but it still isn't easy. As we struggle to translate trade issues into terms that connect with the every day lives of our readers, it seems to me there are at least three issues that pose difficulties for us and probably help to explain some of our deficiencies: 1. How do we evaluate supposed expert opinion in an area such as trade policy, and how do we make sure it is reflected in our reporting and opinion writing and in more or less unexpurgatedform on op-ed pages? Media people themselves have a major responsibility to find ways to reach out to academicians for information and insight. But if you care about the connection between academic research and analysis and policy, you had better spend some time thinking about how you do some informal teaching and advocacy with people in the media. We in our business get assaulted daily by self-interested promoters of one policy perspective or another, much of it slickly disguised as disinterested. There are a number of think tanks that crank out propaganda at an incredible rate. While we need to know how to discount the undeserving and self-serving, it's important that you do enough missionary work that you don't leave us totally disconnected from theory and analysis within the university . I've long been grateful to Bob Stern for thinking I might be able to absorb something from an esoteric discussion of the behavior of exchange rates. You may be casting your pearls before swine, but it is a necessary and important process. 2. In a time when the means of communication...

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