By Normon Solomon

      As police fired rubber bullets through tear gas in Quebec City, many reporters echoed the claim that "free trade" promotes democracy. Meanwhile, protesters struggled to shed light on a key fact: The proposed hemispheric trade pact would give large corporations even more power to override laws that have been enacted -- democratically -- to protect the environment, labor and human rights.

Protests against the likes of the World Trade Organization, and now the Free Trade Area of the Americas, have great impact because they resonate widely. Foes of global corporatization are speaking and acting on behalf of huge grassroots constituencies.

The ABC television program "This Week" deigned to air a discussion with a real-live progressive activist, Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. Journalist Cokie Roberts voiced befuddlement: "It's gotten to the point where any time there are global meetings, world leaders meeting, we have a sense that the protesters are going to be there, and there's not much sense of exactly what you're protesting." The interview only lasted a couple of minutes.

What did get plenty of media attention was noted at the outset of the April 24 lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, which yearned for "a world where TV cameras prefer trade agreements to black-clad anarchists." Some of those few "black-clad anarchists" call themselves the Black Bloc.

Routinely slipping by, with scant journalistic scrutiny, is what we could dub the "White Bloc" -- a nexus of immense media power serving corporate interests.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, at the right edge of the Bloc, is much honored by the media establishment. Last year, Journal columnist Paul Gigot won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This year, in mid-April, the same award went to another very conservative columnist for the newspaper, Dorothy Rabinowitz. But it's the unheralded daily output of the White Bloc that can be most breathtaking.

On the day Rabinowitz's prize was announced, for instance, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal featured a freelance article that began this way: "In the early 1990s, America's major cities were on life-support, suffocating under socialistic policies that left them looking like Soviet-bloc relics." (It was not a humor piece, by the way.) Farther down the page was a column headlined "The Monarchy Is Worth Saving," written by the Journal's deputy editorial features editor, who earnestly argued that British citizens need their monarchy "as a source of authority."

Free-marketeers at the Times know how to pound away at the same line. While heads of state prepared to leave the Quebec summit, Paul Krugman ended his column by writing that the protesters "are doing their best to make the poor even poorer." Two days later, Thomas Friedman concluded his column by explaining that "these 'protesters' should be called by their real name: The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor."

The White Bloc (which includes people of all colors if suitably conformist) has its own forms of hip solidarity. On the "Hardball" national TV program, airing on both MSNBC and CNBC, host Chris Matthews closed his April 18 interview with Friedman exactly this way:

Matthews: "You are the future, my man. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times."

Friedman: "Thanks, bro."

Matthews: "The smartest columnist in the world."