At a forum on journalists and NAFTA last month, James Glassman, a regular contributor to The Washington Post business page, defended his paper's lopsided coverage of the recent trade debate. There are issues, Glassman said, on which to be fair to both sides is to do a "disservice to the debate." In other words, NAFTA opponents like myself just couldn't match his mental voltage, and to take us seriously was merely to propagate our ignorance.

"To me," Glassman said, "NAFTA never should have been this close."

That admission does not surprise me, Nor does it surprise me that, for all the ink that flowed on NAFTA, people still tell me they have only a vague notion of what the issues really were. For months, I and other members of Congress tried to engage a real public debate over the economics of NAFTA, and we just couldn't.

Instead, the media caricatured NAFTA opponents and created straw men: Pat Buchanan the nativist and primitive, Ross Perot the kook, plus a bunch of Smoot-Hawley retards, labor dupes, and backwoods isolationists. (Our opposition was based solely On "fear of change and fear of foreigners," asserted Anthony Lewis in The New York Times, expressing the condescension of the mainstream press.)

As the debate heated up, the media reduced it to the familiar horse race -- how many more votes does the president need? -- and gave short shrift to both the specifics of the treaty and its antiquated conceptual underpinnings. Throughout, the media showed great reverence for credentialed experts (in the Times, Sylvia Nasar cited economist Paul Samuelson's "legendary textbook") and an inability to consider the possibility that these experts were -- gasp! -- wrong. The phrase "economists say" became the end of the discussion, when it should have been the beginning.

As a result, we NAFTA opponents felt trapped in an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which things reported were the opposite of things that were. For example, we read that we were hysterical alarmists, while the mainstream media were the ones who were hyperventilating. If we sent NAFTA back for more work, Business Week warned in large ominous type, "the consequences for the world could be dire." We were lectured on the bracing rigors of competition by reporters and columnists whose own jobs were safe, by reason of language and caste, from the inroads of dollar-an-hour Mexican labor. Most of all, we kept hearing about an imposing anti-NAFTA juggernaut, while these same newspapers and magazines were in effect forming a pro-NAFTA juggernaut of their own.

The cheerleading became so loud that I decided to count copy. From January on, The Washington Post devoted some sixty-three feet to pro-NAFTA editorials and columns, while the anti-NAFTA side got only eleven feet. At other major papers, the ratio was about the same, or even more lopsided. The news pages, meanwhile, were implicitly conveying the same message: we opponents deserved no more than the obligatory balancing quote. Stories in The New York Times quoted three NAFTA supporters for every NAFTA opponent, according to FAIR, the media-watch group. At the Post, the tilt was more than four to one.

In other words, while the major papers preached free trade for the economic marketplace, they practiced intellectual protectionism -- a kind of journalistic Smoot-Hawley -- in the marketplace of ideas.

Meanwhile, the way the media dealt with NAFTA itself was grossly simplistic. Dismissing what they clearly considered petty details and focusing on "the big picture," reporters, columnists, and commentators almost uniformly played NAFTA as an abstract debate over "free trade" rather than as a specific trade agreement that is severely flawed in ways large and small. It was as though the media were debating the merits of medical insurance, as opposed to the specific proposals for providing it.

Most Americans never found out, for example, that, behind the veil of "free trade," NAFTA protects Mexican producers of everything from potatoes to beans. The U.S. agreed to phase out its tariffs on Mexican potatoes over five years, while Mexico will take ten years to eliminate its own tariffs. America opens the door to Mexican french fries immediately, while Mexico sets a quota for U.S. fries at less than the 1991 level and continues its current 15-20 percent tariff for ten years.

Free trade? Or just a great deal for corporate food processors who want to move to Mexico and sell back into the U.S.? That kind of question -- and potatoes and french fries are just two of thousands of such issues -- rarely got asked.

The media were similarly myopic on the "big picture" itself- the economic premises on which the whole agreement was based. A piece by David Rosenbaum in the Times on September 19 was typical. GOOD ECONOMICS MEET PROTECTIVE POLITICS was the headline, embracing two erroneous assumptions in just five words. In The New Yorker, Sidney Blumenthal quoted Mickey Kantor, the administration's trade rep, approvingly. The only obstacle to the agreement was dumb, benighted politics, Kantor said. "We have won the intellectual argument on this."

Just possibly they won because the media permitted only a straw man to get into the debate. The debate was not over fair and open trade. Of course, we need that. Rather, the debate was -- or should have been -- over the rules for such trade, and over the system of governance to enforce those rules. Ultimately, it was -- or should have been -- over whether NAFTA is based on the world economy that actually exists or the relic that inhabits economic theory.

"Since the time of Adam Smith more than 200 years ago," Rosenbaum wrote, "Western economists have been trained in the principle that unrestricted trade is the best policy." Great. But isn't that precisely the kind of conventional wisdom that reporters ought to be questioning? As James Fallows pointed out in The Atlantic last month, "Western" really means "Anglo-American." Much of the rest of the world simply doesn't follow the pronouncements that economists in Britain and America take as gospel. In addition, Rosenbaum typically didn't go on to ask the crucial question: Exactly how does the conventional Anglo-American belief apply in a world that is fundamentally different from the one in which Smith wrote?

The modern corporation, for example, the dominant part of our economic landscape, didn't even exist in Adam Smith's day. Back then, producers were rooted in locality and nation, and their interests could hardly be separated from the national interest. Today, by contrast, capital is "mobile," in the economists' phrase. It's a sort of international free agency, a ball game in which the major players can change sides in the middle of the game.

In this context, orthodox free trade becomes a contest to attract corporate producers. Rather than competing to sell products, nations compete to attract the corporate investment to make the products. The result is to intensify "smokestack chasing," the kind of bidding war that has driven states to offer massive taxpaper subsidies to private organizations and that, on the international level, can drag down safety and environmental standards.

In this sense, NAFTA was not so much wrong as half-baked. It frees capital investment, but lacks a system of governance to ensure that the resulting trade is fair and really works to the benefit of this nation. We could have drafted a better version that addressed this defect, but we didn't.

NAFTA does create a governance system. But it's one that enables corporations to challenge our environmental and other laws as "barriers to trade." My state has a law against corporate farming. Will that now be seen as a "barrier" to foreign investment that corporations can strike down? Rarely did the media explore the implications of the dispute process. Nor did reporters ask how it would work in practice. North Dakota has had sobering experience, under the Canadian Free Trade Agreement which was a kind of preview of NAFTA.

To make a long story short, Canadian farmers flooded the American market with subsidized durum wheat, the kind used in pasta. The price was so low that they displaced about a third of the durum acreage in my state. Yet the special panel created under the agreement decided that the Canadian subsidies didn't count. It turned out that the U.S. negotiators had made a secret deal to that effect. Are there any such secret deals in NAFTA? Do we have any reason to believe that the dispute process in the Mexican agreement will work out any better? Few reporters bothered to ask. Nor did the media explore such questions as how the IRS, with its out-dated multinational tax enforcement methods, is going to stop corporations from juggling profits between their subsidiaries on both sides of the border.

Already, some 72 percent of foreign-controlled corporations (and more than half of U.S.-controlled multinationals) pay not a penny in federal income taxes, thanks largely to such juggling. If the IRS does not scrap its green-eyeshadeera methods, NAFTA will only make the problem worse.

On October 26, 1993, while the NAFTA fracas raged on, The New York Times ran a front-page analysis of the economics of medical care that challenged the textbook market model. The reporter, the same David Rosenbaum who didn't question NAFTA's gospel, showed why that premise just doesn't work in the medical industry as it exists today. That's the kind of thinking reporters should bring to the realm of trade. Watergate taught the media to be skeptical of elected officials. Now it's time for a similar skepticism regarding credentialed economic experts. The media also should practice what they preach. If they are going to lecture us on the importance of free and open markets, then they should permit free and open debate in their own marketplace of ideas.

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