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Opening paragraph: "Officials from the United States and 11 other countries bordering the Pacific are trying to complete a trade agreement by the end of the year that could help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies."

Sounds pretty positive and makes it look like only a totally irrational person would oppose it...

Last paragraph: "A good agreement would lower duties and trade barriers on most products and services, strengthen labor and environmental protections, limit the ability of governments to tilt the playing field in favor of state-owned firms and balance the interests of consumers and creators of intellectual property. Such a deal will not only help individual countries but set an example for global trade talks."

Again, super positive, up-beat, "let's do it!" sort of thing...

Second to last paragraph, closing: "Others are worried about provisions on intellectual property that could restrict the availability of generic medicines and grant longer copyright protections to big media companies."

Huh? Doesn't sound good at all, but if I am to believe the rest of this rosy article, these must be uneducated and paranoid people... right?

This is exactly why I personally view this as an endorsement. None of the issues raised by the EFF are addressed or even named in a meaningful name. What does it actually mean to "balance the interests of consumers and creators of intellectual property"? Are they so worried about creators or end owners?

Now let's examine what EFF is raising: Need for open debate, need for a check on the executive branch by the legislative branch, need for full disclosure of potential conflicts of interests... Sounds very reasonable to me. In fact, why wouldn't you want an open and fair debate on this? What are we to lose?

The idea that an international treaty cannot supercede the law of the land and the proper legislative processes of the land set US apart in the historic terms. Before this notion, the head of the state usually had unilateral ability to sign a treaty. Wikipedia has a solid write up on the treaty clause and I encourage everyone to read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause

I invite you to apply the same sort of forensic analysis to the EFF article and then tell me with a straight face that it isn't awash in FUD.

Their article is written with a clear purpose of inciting an outsized reaction and waking people from just accepting the status quo. That's what they do and that is exactly why people donate to them - to kickstart debate on issues such as this.

I fail to see why you would want to compare a statement from a well known activist foundation with a supposed journalistic editorial from a major newspaper. The two organizations have completely different purposes and missions.

When I think journalism, and NY Times specifically, I always hope to see integrity and a check on those in power. Unfortunately, in this case it looks like a mouthpiece for special interests...

Wow, impressive double standard you have going on there.

journalistic editorial

Filed under 'unclear on the concept.'

The EFF is an advocacy organization. They advocate.

The NY Times is a journalist organization. Although they express their opinions in the OpEd page, I still expect a different style from them than I do from the EFF.

That being said, I also hold the EFF to a high standard, not because they are an advocacy organization, but because they are my FAVORITE advocacy organization. I wish that they would not characterize the NY Times editorial as "endorsing" the treaty when it merely "speaks well of it".

A great deal of intent is telegraphed by how you say things and the words you choose to use. Starting out with something like "[the agreement] could help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies" definitely is putting a positive spin on something which I find a bit odd given the text of the agreement isn't even public .

Thank you. They waited until the 2nd-to-last paragraph to mention criticisms of the agreement, and never mention the secrecy involved. Clearly a positive analysis, even if they didn't explicitly write "approve this trade agreement."

A positive analysis !== "NYT endorses".

This is semantics, but I wouldn't describe what the NYT did here as "endorsing the current TPP proposal".

"NYT EDITORIAL BOARD ISSUES POSITIVE ANALYSIS"

Sure sounds like an endorsement. See for example:

en·dorse·ment enˈdôrsmənt / noun noun: endorsement; plural noun: endorsements; noun: indorsement; plural noun: indorsements

    1. an act of giving one's public approval or support to someone or something.

[In any event, the critique seems to be that regardless of the position of the paper, EFF wants the NYT to leak the contents for analysis by 3rd parties.]

1. Context and common usage often flavours words in a way that isn't captured by the definition. I'd argue that a certain amount of positive attitude has to be expressed before it's considered an endorsement. It can't be just any non-zero positivity.

2. The article speaks of this type of agreement in general, and not the specific agreement that is being worked on. I could say that I like the idea of Toronto having a mayor without liking Rob Ford.

3. "NYT EDITORIAL BOARD ISSUES POSITIVE ANALYSIS" is nowhere to be found in the article. I'd rather rate the article text itself for endorsement, not synopses (even my own).

I don't think the NYT Editorial Board has actually seen the contents.

It's not odd at all, because what they are coming out in favor of is having a good Pacific trade agreement. They are neither endorsing nor disapproving of whatever is actually in this particular agreement.

Analogy: suppose Monsanto has a new pesticide that increases crop yields, but causes some serious environmental damage.

I write an editorial coming out in favor of increasing crop yields.

If the EFF were reading my editorial the way they are reading the Times, they would claim that I have endorsed Monsanto's new pesticide.

No, this is more like Monsanto announcing that they have a secret new pesticide that will provide amazing benefits.

Many people criticize it due to Monsanto's track record of causing environmental damage, and due to certain leaks of information that suggest it may be quite bad.

Then you write an article saying that you are all in favor of Monsanto coming out with a new pesticide that strikes a good balance between the interests of the farmer's increased crop yields and the damage to the environment around them.

Do you see what they did there? They not only blew off the concerns of people worried about intellectual property overreach ("balance the interests of consumers and creators of intellectual property" implies that there are two distinct groups of people and that there is some kind of balance between them, which vastly oversimplifies concerns about intellectual property), but by stating their endorsement for this agreement that they haven't seen (even in the abstract, of "we support a good deal that does the right things") they are basically implying that they think the general direction of the deal is positive. Even though they hedge their bets, they are using pretty strongly positive language here.

But they are talking about it as if this was it. They may not be very obvious about it but:

1) They are talking about a "good trade agreement"

2) They're talking about TPP-only in this article (since there are no alternatives anyway, nor do we know about the specific issues in the TPP, since they're keeping it secret).

My guess is most people will make the cognitive connection there and assume that the "good trade agreement" is the TPP.

Either way, I really don't care what NYT thinks about it, or doesn't. What I care about is for TPP to become public, way before they even try to pass it in certain countries.

You forgot the step where Monsanto shows up for an editorial board meeting and provides background information that makes an editorial on crop yields timely and relevant to current events. An NYT editorial on a treaty negotiations does not appear for no reason.

There is a reason others on this thread make the connection to the NYT's support for the war. This is another "slam dunk."

You can certainly gauge the potential benefits of a trade agreements by considering them in the context of historic trade agreements. The idea that lowering tariffs tends to promote trade and leads to net economic growth is hardly controversial in economics.

I agree with you that the editorial falls short of an endorsement -- at most, it's an endorsement of the effort, not the result, which hasn't even emerged yet.

But I don't agree that the EFF response is "ludicrous scaremongering". I think the EFF is right that there is a substantial danger here of serious problems, which the editorial mentions (even linking to a page on the subject) but doesn't, to my mind, give a sufficiently stern warning about. Furthermore, the word "secret" does not appear in the editorial. I agree with others who find it shallow and naïvely uncritical.

At the same time, there are definitely benefits to be had from trade agreements.

It opens with what reads like an endorsement - "Officials from the United States and 11 other countries bordering the Pacific are trying to complete a trade agreement by the end of the year that could help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies."

That's not an endorsement, just a statement of fact. Trade deals often boost economic growth and lead to closer bi- or multilateral cooperation between nations.

An endorsement would be something like 'the agreement may not be perfect, but it would be in America's interests. President Obama should sign it and the Senate should ratify it.' I might also note that the NYT has quite recently featured op-eds highly critical of the TPP, a curious strategy for a newspaper that is supposed to be endorsing it, eg http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/obamas-covert-trad...

I'm pro-trade in general but haven't formed an opinion on the TPP so far because its outlines are unclear. The best summary that I've read on the subject suggests that negotiations are strongly motivated by strategic considerations: http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21583995-negotiations-sec...

How do they know that it is a statement of fact and not completely misleading if they are not allowed to read the agreement though?

They present it positively, but it might be severely damaging and without reading the text they really don't know.

Obviously trade agreements in general can be good, but this article is about this trade agreement in particular, not the general concept of them, so for them to to start with a positive feel-good spin on something they are banned from reading, does seem somewhat off.

Because it's a statement about the potential of a trade deal. Historically, some trade deals have yielded such benefits, and the size of the economic territory involved means that the potential upside here is significant.

But they don't know the potential of this trade deal because they do not have the text of it so cannot draw a comparison with historic trade deals. To present something as positive based on history when the thing is secret is nonsense. Is like someone hovering around a shell game who only talks about the previous winners.

It's easy to assess the potential of the trade deal, by the simple expedient of counting up the various deadweight losses attributable to tariffs. It's not like we don't know what existing tariffs are or what costs they impose on trade flows, that information is public. For a very rough estimate of the potential gains, you can look at the size of the market for a given trade area and multiply that by the measured increase in economic growth from previous free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, the EU and others.

If you want to learn more about it I suggest this CRS primer: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40502.pdf

"I haven't formed an opinion on TPP yet because its outlines are unclear."

None of us can construct an informed opinion because the content is being deliberately kept secret until it is too late for anyone but the privileged few to have a say.

I'm quite content to wait until it comes up for ratification. As I mentioned above, a deal you can vote on is far preferable to no deal at all, which is what we have with the WTO for over a decade now.

It sounds like a statement of the deal's goal to me. Definitely not an endorsement.

That's a pretty weak endorsement... "could help" doesn't mean "would help". It just looks like the author didn't choose their words carefully enough.

Reading the actual article, the most striking thing is that NYT actually didn't say anything about the agreement, even though causal user might conclude they did and they are in support of it.

But in fact, that didn't happen. They described what Obama administration would like to do (which doesn't even mean they really want to do it, since the administration lies all the time, let alone that they would actually be able to do it). They described how hard it to reach an agreement in general. They described that there are people that are worried about the agreement. They described how an imaginary cool agreement would look like. What they actually didn't is to describe what the actual agreement is or what it actually does. For all we know, they could be selling their souls to the Devil or joining the Galactic Empire and the article would look exactly the same.

So NYT editorial board just wasted time of their readership to say "it would be nice if the agreement were nice, and Obama administration wants it to be nice". Without providing a shred of actual information on the actual agreement.

The NYT is saying what its standards of a good agreement would be and what the priorities of its editorial board are, which provides a clue to the administration about the probability of getting an endorsement from the paper. They didn't say 'it would be nice if the agreement were nice,' but rather spelled what they would consider 'nice.'

How can they call it good, if they don't know what else is in there? Did they mention this point?

They're not doing that. They're describing their ideal of a good agreement, ie signalling what they would like to see.

It doesn't sound like this. At least they could explicitly point out the problem of heavy secrecy and lack of transparency in TPP as a sign of a bad agreement which they don't like to see.

Editorials are meant as an expression of opinion, not a comprehensive description. I don't find the secrecy an automatic negative; very often it's a prerequisite for brokering deals, especially at the international level.

Too many participants and too much scrutiny can lead to paralysis. I thought this was one f the major weaknesses of the Occupy Wall Street movement; for some reason they decided their general assemblies should run without any procedure for terminating discussion, and that no resolution could be passed without 90% agreement. Predictably they never managed to settle on a list of demands before the momentum evaporated.

I appreciate that you may find my realpolitik approach somewhat lizard-like.

In this case secrecy is a clear negative, since we know who is involved - the crooked minded DRM lobby who created DMCA 1201 and tries to spread this sickness with each and every opportunity.

I very much doubt that the secrecy is at the behest of the DRM lobby unless the treaty turns out to be about IP issues and nothing else, in which case I'll gladly eat my words. This belief seems to be a rather mypoic view and I think IT activists are in danger of making it into a bogeyman and thus sidelining themselves.

Why? Because IP and DRM are ultimately a small part of the trade puzzle, dwarfed by issues like agricultural trade barriers (eg Japan's 777.7% tariff on imported rice, in a country of ~120m, most of whom eat rice daily, which amounts to billions a year in deadweight loss on a single commodity - see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/business/global/12yen.html... for background).

Personally I think the secrecy has a lot to do with preventing interference by China, which is conspicuously not part of the treaty negotiations. You may recall the administration is trying to effect a 'strategic pivot' towards Asia to counter China's expanding foreign policy influence. Thanks to the oil & natural gas boom, the US is well on the road to energy independence and thus the Middle East is no longer the nation's major strategic focus.

Whether its dwarfed or not, isn't the point. The point is, that DRM lobby sneaked that junk into the agreement. Since there is no way to remove the junk without tanking it all, let's tank it. It should send them a message - don't accept junk in the future agreements if you want them to succeed. If they are fools not to learn from the ACTA lesson, then they need another one.