I came across something recently on my Medium.com feed, it was a post by “Barack Obama” (I’m pretty sure the POTUS isn’t really managing this account, let’s not kid ourselves), on the test of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal.
Now from first impressions, this would look like a good thing. The TPP was considered to be a very secretive set of trade negotiations. We knew that talks and negotiations were occurring, but we didn’t really know what the content of the negotiations were, what were up for grabs, and the compromises that would inevitably be made. So for the White House to release the text of the TPP to the public seems like a good step in the first direction for the White House to start their “Hearts and Minds” campaign to convince Americans of the benefits of the deal…You would think, until you actually take a look at the text, or rather, the text’s length.
Unsurprisingly, for what Obama claims as “…the highest standard trade agreement in history.” the TPP text is insanely long in length. It has over 30 chapters (not including Annexes), and according to medium would take nearly 15.5 hours to read. And the length shouldn’t really come as any surprise. Trade deals are messy and complicated beasts and they need endless chapters, articles and clauses in order to make sure that there is enough for all parties to be happy, and that all possible scenarios are taken into account, and that everything is neatly defined so that there is no confusion at all in the future after the ink is dry.
The problem with long trade agreements however, is that very few people have neither the capacity nor the patience to really go through the endless details of a trade agreement (I will admit that in writing this post I haven’t even bothered to crack beyond the first chapter). Now there will of course be people whom are willing to go through the fine minutia of the text. But those people will most likely either be academics, lobbies or policy makers whom have a genuine and direct interest in understanding all of the guidelines and loopholes that are present in the text. You’re average “Joe on the street”, won’t really bother going through the entire text. Which makes the idea of posting the text online, quite redundant. Sure it’s up there, but if no one reads it, is there really a point? The transparency is there, but it’s utterly useless.
One solution to this problem would of course be the idea that we should let others try and distill down the trade deal into small and digestible bits that regular lay people will be able to understand and comprehend. And of course media outlets are doing that. But the problem is that because the text is so complicated, I’m sure that any media outlet, on all sides of the political spectrum will be able to twist and interpret the deal so as to align with their narrative. This is evident by just how divided Americans can get on which news source they trust to deliver them their news. In a report filed by Pew Research last year, they found that there are very few media outlets that are trusted by both Liberals and Conservatives (The Wall Street Journal seems to be the only media source trusted across the spectrum). Liberals tend to get their sources of information from a variety of different sources (that are rarely trusted by conservatives), and conservatives mostly seem to get their information from Fox News, what’s more interesting is that it seems that whichever is the preferred/trusted news source of one side, is completely distrusted by the other. Which isn’t all that surprising, if a news source reports something you inherently disagree with, of course you would not trust it to deliver what you see as quality news.
The other issue, is that there also seems to be a growing amount of distrust in media in general, as reported by a Gallup Poll. The distrust in media seems to be especially strong among the younger generation. Which can in part explain the rise of social media posts and citizen journalism as a growing source of media for the younger generation (the generation I’m a part of). It seems people no longer trust the media to deliver them the facts without the liberal application of propaganda and fact-twisting.
And coming back to the TPP text, this means that having a single media outlet (perhaps with the exception of the Wall Street Journal), come out with a purely fact-based summary of the TPP deal that all sides agree is true, is probably near impossible. There is very little overlap among people on the political spectrum on a shared trusted news source. And even if there was, would people trust the “media” in general to really deliver them the facts?
Transparency isn’t enough. Just sharing the pure text of the TPP isn’t enough to properly drive a political discussion about the TPP that can also include all sectors of society. You also need a trusted agent that can distill it down to it’s most concise form that is able to be understood by all. Or else we are just going to see more people arguing about what is true and what is false, and just alot of shouting all together, no consensus is going to be drawn, and perhaps the wrong decision will be made. And with a deal the size of the TPP, I don’t think anyone can afford a wrong decision at this point.
