The IMF and World Bank are not subjects the corporate media cover in any real sense. Instead, their role is treated as unquestionably immutable and beneficial.
Short overview: Each installment features a literacy guide on a particular issue, institution, or journalistic strategy to help readers understand the ways that liberal media outlets frame the news. “Liberal,” here, is used broadly to include: (1) liberal in the original sense: commitment to free markets, free trade, private property, individual rights, and the rule of law (e.g. The Economist); (2) liberal in the U.S. sense: social tolerance, the Democratic Party, the administrative state, defending the same economic order — only with better manners (e.g. the New York Times); and (3) liberal in the plainest sense: what U.S. liberals read or listen to (e.g. NPR).
Introduction
The first installment of the series focuses on the IMF and the World Bank. As regular readers of Black Agenda Report understand quite well, these are the institutions that lend money to poorer countries. In exchange, they get to impose strict conditions on how these countries’ economies are run: what gets spent, what gets cut, and what gets privatized.
Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a group of young Moroccans who risk swimming to the city of Ceuta, Spain, because they’re not able to find work at home. The World Bank is mentioned three times in the article. It’s used to inform the reader about employment numbers, “fundamental” challenges to job creation, and the per-capita income gap between Morocco and Spain. In each instance, the World Bank is referenced to tell us how bad things are. Oddly enough, it’s never once treated as part of the story of how things got that bad in the first place.
This Times piece is a pretty customary way of how the World Bank and the IMF show up in liberal media outlets. In other words, these institutions aren’t really subjects the press reports on — like the White House, the Knicks, or some tech billionaire’s latest prediction about AI. What we mean by “coverage” is going to look a lot different. Now will the press sometimes publish a piece that is honestly about the IMF and the World Bank? Sure. Maybe if a leadership scandal breaks, a debt report needs publicizing, or it’s been a while since they ran a flattering profile of the Fund’s director. But by and large, these institutions are not something the press covers. They’re what the press covers everything with. And they’re not just a source — they’re the source, the chief authority the liberal media relies on while explaining a currency crash, a food shortage, an empty pharmacy shelf, and a boat full of people swimming for Spain.
Decoder
A few words to look out for…
“Credibility”: A word that seems rather innocent until you realize it makes bankers and lenders the chief judges of a country’s moral worth. Of course, the liberal media would disagree with this framing. They would say the word has nothing do with moral credibility, just the financial kind: will the countries pay back their loans? In a way, they’re absolutely right. A country really is allowed to starve its own people, run a dictatorship, or quell uprisings and maintain its perfect “credibility” in the eyes of the IMF and World Bank — which is a conversation for another day.
But the average reader doesn’t see the word “credible” and thinks to herself, “Oh yeah, that’s just a neutral accounting term.” Instead, “credible” is code for a “responsible, serious grown-up” and “not credible” means a reckless, foolish country that can’t get its act together.
Because the liberal media simply takes the IMF and World Bank at their word when they claim to be in the business of ending poverty, spurring development, and rescuing countries from economic catastrophe, a moral judgment necessarily accompanies any mention of the word “credibility.” If a country cannot pay — if it lacks credibility — then that country probably doesn’t really care about ending poverty, about economic development, or about the future of its own people. Otherwise, the IMF and the World Bank would trust them. Not bad for a word that’s supposedly just about loans.
“Stability”: A word that really means its exact opposite. The policies that blow up people’s lives are referred to as “stabilizing.” When people react to having their lives blown apart, their reaction is “destabilizing.”
“Turbulence”: Ah yes, the language of weather. This Times headline offers a perfect example: “IMF Raises Forecast for Global Growth as Tariff Drag Fades.” What better word than “forecast” to depict the IMF as a weather station, one that accurately and innocently reads conditions that it played absolutely no role in creating. And then we have growth that rises like a tide coming in. Finally, the Times writes oh so poetically about a tariff drag that just happens to fade all on its own. So the coverage calls it “weather,” which means two things follow: no one did it, and (perhaps more importantly) no one can stop it.
“Reforms”: You see “reform” and you think “change.” Good change. The kind that improves something or fixes something. “Reform” is change in a good direction, a direction determined by the World Bank and the IMF (which almost by definition makes it a good direction). These reforms — the “good” changes — refer to steps taken by countries to cut subsidies, freeze wages, sell off public assets, and open up the markets. “Bad” changes, like ending one’s arrangement with the IMF, don’t get to be called “reforms.” So rather than using a misleading term to signal to readers which changes are the “good” ones, maybe the liberal media could stop using “reform” and instead type what it really means: “steps that please investors.”
“Caved”: You’ll never see a country described as “caving” to the IMF. That word is reserved for a leader who submits to demands from somewhere else. The Economist, worried about Kenyan President William Ruto, warns that protesters might “depose politicians” and get a government less “reform-minded.” Apparently, the danger here doesn’t come from the IMF and the World Bank but from the Kenyan government actually listening to the people. Giving in to a protest means you’re “caving.” But giving in to the demands of the IMF means you’re just being a cooperative, responsible partner.
“Frustrations”: This one’s pretty simple. A family is forced off their land and the Times says Vietnam’s growth “mask[s] deep frustrations.” So “her factory was demolished” becomes “she feels frustrated.”
“A dark chapter”: When things go wrong at the IMF and the World Bank, the liberal media will write about how “mistakes were made,” that “important lessons have been learned,” that these well-meaning institutions “have lost sight of their mission,” but they promise to “do better next time.” These institutions don’t need a PR team when they have the Times.
What the Coverage Assumes
Some brief examples of the assumptions that drive the coverage…
That the debt should be repaid.
The media will often cover how countries plan to pay back their debts. But the idea of whether the debt should be paid back never comes up. There’s actually a doctrine on this called odious debt. Say a president or dictator racks up a huge debt that goes against the interests of his people. The new government would be under no moral or legal obligation to pay it back once he’s gone. But you’d probably never know about this term from reading the mainstream coverage of the IMF and the World Bank.
That “stability” means what it sounds like.
This word doesn’t mean you can feed your family, or that you have a stable job, or that there’s a safety net in place in case of emergency. For the liberal media, stability really just means investors can relax — and that the money is safe.
That economics is just neutral ground and not a point of view.
It might be easier to understand what the liberal media is doing here if you think back to that economics professor in undergrad who insists her academic colleagues are engaging in activism or advocacy while she’s just describing how the world works. Think twice before using words like “power” or “social murder” in class. You might get docked a few points for dragging politics into a discussion that’s about economics. What’s that? You didn’t get the memo? Everyone is supposed to stick to language of growth, rationality, and market friction. Oh, and don’t ever write “so-called free market” on your midterm. You’ll be accused of bringing an agenda. Our econ professor friend doesn’t have an agenda. She deals in models. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models to be exact. Find a way to make an impression on your university’s economics department, especially if it’s home to a Nobel laureate and a couple former IMF executives, and you might just find yourself covering global development for the Times. What could possibly go wrong?
That coercion is a thing governments do, and markets are where you’re free.
You can learn a lot from the liberal media about what does and doesn’t count as coercion. It will regularly describe governments using force — “imposing,” “cracking down,” “controlling,” etc. But apparently, the market is incapable of pushing anyone around. So when the IMF tells a country it will lose the loan unless it cuts its subsidies and privatizes its utilities, that doesn’t count as force. Somehow it counts as freedom.
What the Coverage Does
How the coverage’s assumptions become yours…
It presents a full picture but with a key culprit left out.
Sometimes the liberal media coverage features a story about these institutions without mentioning them even once. You’d be surprised how many news articles like this are out there. The Times, for example, ran a rather powerful and detailed piece about deaths caused by venomous snakes in Africa, a story you would never guess was actually about the IMF and the World Bank.
The article identifies lots of causes: understaffed clinics; clinics too far away; farmers bitten after dark; the refrigeration failing; etc.
But there’s no word of the conditions made possible by the IMF and the World Bank: the freezing of public sector hiring; roads built toward the ports instead of the villages; the farmer’s workday now running on cash crops to service the debt; the power grids built to reach the ports instead of the clinics.
Read enough global health articles in liberal media outlets and you’ll notice a pattern. They tell us that antivenom, regretfully, like a whole host of medications, is “unaffordable.” What the journalists mean, of course, is that it’s unprofitable. They’ll even use language of market failure when the market realized it can’t make a profit off antivenom in Africa. Apparently, if after running the numbers, it turns out that withdrawing a life-saving treatment is the most reasonable course of action, then the market is failing. The coverage will never admit this is just what markets do.
So in an article that details the lack of access many African communities have to antivenom, you’ll
never see the IMF and the World Bank mentioned as characters in the story. That’s because according to the Times, they’re not. Sure, it’s a compelling and thorough investigation into one of the region’s deadliest creatures. It just never mentions the other two.
It gets you to trust these institutions.
The liberal media has never actually laid out a case for why the IMF and World Bank are noble institutions. Or why they’re trustworthy. It just treats them that way — and because of that, so do we. It’s not so much that we’re all being duped (although many of us certainly are), but rather that the Times is so widely regarded as the gold standard in journalism that the easiest conclusion to reach is: Well, if a publication that careful takes these institutions this seriously, then why wouldn’t they deserve our trust? There’s no need for me to vet the World Bank and the IMF. We can be certain the Times did its due diligence for us.
Think of how an avid Times reader might react after learning about the institutions’ long history of funding dictatorships. She probably won’t express shock and outrage. She’ll probably say something along the lines of, “I’m sure there must have been a pretty good reason behind all this.” The response makes perfect sense. If all you’ve ever read about the IMF and the World Bank has come from a newspaper that assumes these institutions’ benevolence — that says they always mean well, that they’re “imperfect,” like every institution, but always trying to help — then it should come as no surprise that you trust them the same way you trust your doctor.
It teaches you to defer to them.
Now you trust the IMF and the World Bank — mostly because you trust the New York Times. The logical next step is for you to defer to their authority just like the Times does. So next time you hear a country is falling apart, you’ll have a new default. You’ll immediately think to yourself, “Oh boy, what do the IMF and the World Bank think should happen?” Of all the questions you could ask when a country’s inflation spikes or a government closes its rural health clinics, that’s the one that first comes to mind. And of all the voices you could consult or listen to — the people losing their jobs and the ones agitating in the streets — your priority (and the Times’ priority) is finding out what everyone’s saying back at IMF headquarters. I mean they are the experts, after all.
It takes away your ability to be horrified.
Back in April, when President Trump said, referring to Iran, that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” a co-host on CNBC asked, “How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk?” And it wasn’t the first time the network said the quiet part out loud. Years earlier, CNBC ran the headline, “Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’” People were horrified both times, and rightly so. The Times, for its part, knows how to make all this sound a lot less vulgar. But don’t worry — it still makes sure to respect mass death as a critical part of the investor’s calculus. The more polite liberal media would just resort to other language: it’ll say that “markets weighed the geopolitical risk” and that a breakthrough medical cure “raises difficult, but important questions about the durability of the revenue stream.” So it’s not so much that the Times would never ask these questions. It’s that it would never ask them like that.
The Range
The range of dissenting opinions that’s permitted by the liberal media to appear balanced — and the perspectives it excludes, dilutes, or metabolizes.
While they would probably avoid the phrase “fair and balanced” to distance themselves from the early days of Fox News, liberal media outlets will always tell you how much they value a diversity of perspectives. Consider a Times article from 2021 titled, “Debate Looms Over I.M.F.: Should It Do More Than Put Out Fires?” The debate is between those who want the IMF to stick to its old job and those who want to promote a “greener and fairer” economy. Sounds fair and balanced until you realize the person representing the more progressive “activist climate agenda” is none other than the one who runs the Fund: Kristalina Georgieva.
The author of the article continues: “Whatever role one might prefer for the I.M.F. — traditional, expanded or something else entirely…” Something else entirely? Are they really considering this? You can probably guess how the story ends and which changes to the Fund are taken seriously. We all know the limit of the liberal media’s range by this point.
See, the Times would never fill in that gap with a perspective like Keston Perry’s, which we find in an article for Al Jazeera titled, “The IMF and the World Bank must be abolished to save the planet.” Neither Perry nor the many Caribbean communities demanding abolition are going to be quoted sources — whether that be in the news section or opinion. The liberal media seems fine with activists, especially if the “activist” also happens to be the managing director of the IMF. They’re even fine with activists who say “do more” or “do less” or “we need a seat at the table.” It’s all within the permissible range of debate. But get rid of these institutions altogether? That’s crossing the line.
Roberto Sirvent is Editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum. He is co-author, with Danny Haiphong, of the book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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