The nation’s best media review, Extra!, says the biggest news story most Americans haven’t heard of is the Trans Pacific Partnership, a treaty being negotiated secretly between the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, and other Pacific Rim countries, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru and Singapore. Extra! Says that most major TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN) have ignored the treaty. A few newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have had some coverage, all pro-treaty.
Negotiated with corporate lobbyists, the treaty would, among other things, promote job offshoring to lower-wage countries like Vietnam (with a minimum wage of 28 cents a hour), give corporations the right to enter signatory nations to extract natural resources without government approval, and make life-saving generic drugs too expensive for millions of people who need them to stay alive.
Yet TPP has received only a fraction of the coverage devoted to foreign news of much less import.
You’ve probably heard of Benghazi.