The media's Japan problem.

• Author: Fingleton, Eamonn
• Position: How the press portrays US trade relations with Japan

The "right-hand drive" story circulated quickly through the American editorial pages. The U.S. threat to impose nearly $6 billion in tariffs on Japanese luxury car exports unless the Japanese opened their markets was ill-advised, the editorials argued, because it was American car makers who were at fault. The arrogant Big Three automakers had consistently failed to make cars with steering wheels on the right side, badly hurting sales in Japan. United States Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, the argument went, was flirting with a trade war over a non-issue.

But American auto companies make plenty of high-quality right-hand drive cars in their European plants. Many foreign car buyers in Japan actually prefer the steering wheel on the American side. It's a status symbol. Yet all these cars, wherever the steering wheel configuration, have long sold poorly in Japan because most auto distributors are under the thumb of the Japanese automaking industry.

You'd never know that from the media. On even the simplest and most easily verifiable aspects of this essential international relationship, the American press can be utterly unreliable. As a result, U.S. efforts to break down Japanese trade barriers have been consistently undercut.

Although no major publication regularly read in America can claim a good record of reporting on Japan, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist deserve special recognition as sources of slanted misinformation. In 1989, for instance, commenting on Japan's extraordinarily small appetite for manufactured imports, The Economist's editors went so far as to assert that "there is no evidence that protection is the cause of it." The Journal, meanwhile, has wantonly underplayed the importance of trade deficits. In 1994, one editorial stated: "The best solution for the [American] trade deficit would be to stop reporting it."

The shortcomings of these publications are all the more significant because American reporters turn to them as the experts in business journalism. Consequently, the mistakes of the Journal and The Economist--most of which serve to remove responsibility from Japan for the continuing U.S. trade deficit with that nation, now pegged at $66 billion--quickly become the conventional wisdom to be aped by other newspapers and magazines. And the American reading public, subjected to naive and superficial journalism, is left with virtually no sense of what a powerful challenge Japan's continuing economic expansionism presents to the West.

Perhaps the single most pernicious part of the conventional wisdom is the idea that Japan "shoots itself in the foot" by practicing...