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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (April 7, 2018)
Page 4A East Oregonian Saturday, April 7, 2018 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OUR VIEW Independent media survives in your back yard The website Deadspin created a video last week, which creepily showed dozens of Sinclair news anchors around the country saying the same words, in sort of a toneless monologue. Here is part of the script, transcribed from the Seattle-based Sinclair station: “Hi, I’m (A) ____________, and I’m (B) _________________… (B) Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Northwest communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that KOMO News produces. (A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. (B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories ... stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first. (A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’ ... This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.” It’s mostly anti-media malarkey, quite en vogue these days thanks to a president who is much more media-obsessed and media-savvy than his predecessors. Unsurprisingly, he expressed his support for Sinclair’s mission because they have expressed their support for his. We do think the response to the video has been a bit overblown as the influence of TV news is on the wane, but the irony of 100 voices sharing a choreographed message chiding irresponsible media isn’t lost on us. And it’s understandable not to want a single large corporation to reach its corporate tentacles into local newscasts across the country. It’s doubly dangerous when that group is motivated so transparently by political bias, which is certainly the case with Sinclair. State-run media is a sign of autocracy, not democracy. At the East Oregonian, we’re proud to be an independent, community- centered media voice. Every word that appears in our local pages is attributed to a named source, and all of our local content is written by people living right here. Decisions about what runs and where and how are made by people in your communities, too, whose names and phone numbers appear in every edition of the paper. There are no “must-run” dictations from on high. We run what we think our community needs and wants to know. And if you have an issue with our decisions or a dissenting opinion, our doors are always open, and our phone lines are too. We’re actually people, unlike the Facebook algorithm that tells you what you want to read and accepts no feedback. Of course we are also members of the Associated Press, which allows us access to journalists and editors the world over. The AP provides nuts-and- bolts reporting for every kind of outlet, from Fox News to the New York Times. Times are strange for media the world over. The news cycle has been hijacked by online pressures, fake news and Twitter partisans of every ilk. It can seem sometimes that the media is just a giant, headless enterprise that barrels forward, gobbling up time and energy. But we hope it’s calming for readers that their news comes from down the street — printed in Pendleton, reported throughout the area where the news is happening, delivered by your postman. It’s one less thing to worry about in an era where truth is becoming harder to find. OTHER VIEWS The art of the flail I YOUR VIEWS Voters should oppose new livestock district Please vote no on formation of the Salmon Point Livestock District. The residents of Salmon Point have known since they bought their properties that this was open range. We have put up our own electric fence for the last 20 years, which is only a minor inconvenience. One rancher runs 25-35 cows for 4-6 weeks a year on the land adjacent to us. All of Hat Rock is fenced and the petitioners had to include Wanaket Game Preserve to make the minimum acreage requirements, which will never allow grazing. Only a 1,100-foot stretch of land is not fenced by residents and only one home has been built on Salmon Point in the last 10 years. As residents, we should have been able to reach an agreement and built our own fence a long time ago. Forming the district would force the rancher to bear the brunt of construction costs to protect our properties. Once again, please vote no on formation of the livestock district. Floyd Turnbull Hermiston McLeod-Skinner has background to succeed I’ve listened to Jamie McLeod-Skinner participate in several candidate forums and am always impressed with her high regard for education and how she has used her education. Jamie has a degree in civil engineering and a law degree. She put her civil engineering degree and watershed management experience to work improving water supply and sanitation in rural communities in Kosovo. That work required that she coordinate with local governments and non-government officials to successfully (on time and under budget) complete her projects. After obtaining her doctorate in environmental and natural resource law from the University of Oregon, she worked for the Corps of Engineers and later the Klamath County Circuit Court, assisting with the Klamath Basin water rights case. We have a candidate with experience in water rights and watershed management. When has there been a more qualified candidate to serve our rural needs? One of the many things McLeod- Skinner will work to do as our Congressional District 2 representative is improve the basic infrastructure for housing and community development in our rural community. She has the technical background to know what infrastructure we need in our rural district, and the collaborative working experience in a political environment to get it done. I can’t wait to vote for her in the primary on May 15 and again in November to send her to Washington, D.C., to represent our local interests rural Oregon. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. Miriam Gilmer Adams f you’ve been watching stock the economies on the other side of markets, you’re probably feeling the imbalance. Overall, the U.S. trade seasick. The Dow is crashing! No, deficit is just the flip side of the fact it’s bouncing back! Wait, it’s crashing that America attracts more inward again! investment from foreigners than the In general, trying to explain stock amount Americans invest abroad. fluctuations is a mug’s game. But in Trade policy has nothing to do with this case it’s pretty clear what’s going it. on. Whenever investors suspect that Beyond this conceptual confusion, Paul Donald Trump will really go through Krugman there’s a raw fact few people — and, with his threats of big tariff increases, as far as I can tell, nobody in the Comment provoking retaliation abroad, stocks Trump administration — seem to plunge. Every time they decide it’s appreciate: China no longer runs big just theater, stocks recover. Markets really, trade surpluses. really don’t like the idea of a trade war. This wasn’t always true. A decade ago, So is a trade war coming? Nobody China’s current account surplus — a broad knows — even, or perhaps especially, Trump measure that includes trade in services and himself. For while trade is one of Trump’s income from investments abroad — was two signature issues — animus toward more than 9 percent of GDP, a very big dark-skinned people being the other — when number. In 2017, however, its surplus was it comes to making actual demands on other only 1.4 percent of GDP, which isn’t much. countries, the tweeter in chief and his aides Meanwhile, the U.S. ran a current account either don’t know what they want or want deficit of 2.4 percent of GDP, a bit bigger but things that our trading partners can’t deliver. also much smaller than the imbalances of the Not won’t — can’t. mid-2000s. As a result, incoherence rules: The But in that case, why is “bilateral” trade administration lashes out, then tries to calm between the U.S. and China so unbalanced? markets by saying that it might not carry The answer is that it’s largely a kind of through on its threats, then makes a new statistical illusion. China is the Great round of threats. Assembler: It’s where components from Let’s talk in particular about the will-he- other countries, like Japan and South Korea, or-won’t-he confrontation with China. are put together into consumer products for In some ways, China really is a bad actor the U.S. market. So a lot of what we import in the global economy. In particular, it has from China is really produced elsewhere. pretty much thumbed its nose at international It’s not clear why we should demand that rules on intellectual property rights, grabbing China stop playing that role. Indeed, it’s foreign technology without proper payment. not clear that China could even do much to And to be fair, Trump officials do sometimes reduce its bilateral surplus with the U.S.: raise the intellectual property issue as a To do so, it would basically have to have justification for getting tough. a completely different economy. And this But if getting China to pay what it owes just isn’t going to happen unless we have a for technology were the goal, you’d expect full-blown trade war that shuts down much the U.S. both to make specific demands on of the global economy as we know it. that front and to adopt a strategy aimed at Now, Trump himself might be OK with inducing China to meet those demands. large-scale deglobalization. But as we’ve In fact, the U.S. has given little indication seen, his beloved stock market hates the of what China should do about intellectual idea, and with good reason: Businesses have property. Meanwhile, if getting better invested heavily on the assumption that a protection of patent rights and so on were closely integrated global economy is here to stay, and a trade war would leave many of the goal, America should be trying to build those investments stranded. a coalition with other advanced countries to Oh, and a trade war would also devastate pressure the Chinese; instead, we’ve been much of pro-Trump rural America, since a alienating everyone in sight. large share of our agricultural production — Anyway, what seems to really bother Trump aren’t China’s genuine policy sins but including almost two-thirds of food grains its trade surplus with the United States, which — is exported. And that’s why things seem so he has repeatedly said is $500 billion a year. (It’s actually less than $340 billion, but who’s incoherent. One day Trump talks tough on trade; then stocks fall, and his advisers counting?) This trade surplus, he insists, scramble to say that the trade war won’t means that China is winning — in effect really happen; then he worries that he’s stealing $500 billion a year from America. looking weak and tweets out more threats; As many people have pointed out, this and so on. Call it the art of the flail. is junk economics. Except at times of ■ mass unemployment, trade deficits aren’t Paul Krugman joined The New York a subtraction from the economies that run Times in 1999. them, nor are trade surpluses an addition to The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
