commondreams | Last week, more than 550 groups,
representing tens of millions of individual members, signed a letter to
members of Congress urging them to vote against a push by President
Obama for 'fast track' authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a
so-called "free trade" now under negotation between the U.S. and eleven
other Pacific rim nations.
The week before that, another 50 groups launched an energized online campaign called StopFastTrack.com
in order to kill the TPP agreement—dubbed "NAFTA on steroids"—that they
say "threatens everything you care about: democracy, jobs, the
environment, and the Internet."
But if you watch the evening cable or broadcast news shows, you might
not know anything about the TPP—not what it is, not why Obama says it
would be good for the country, and certainly not why these hundreds of
public interest groups, environmentalists, economists, and labor
organizations say trade agreements like this are the source of economic
and labor woes, not the solution to them.
According to a new study
by Media Matters, over the last sixth months the network evening news
shows—including ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS—have ignored the TPP almost
completely.
