Protesting a war, and the deafening silence that ensued

Once again, I experience the mainstream news media's information blockade first-hand.

I went to an anti-war protest in Washington, DC today. Held at Constitution Gardens, next to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the rally and then march around the white house featured speakers such as Jesse Jackson, Susan Sarandon, and many activists, community and NGO leaders, and students. Thousands of youngsters, elderly, middle-aged and young adults of all races and religions and sexual orientations showed up to protest the unwavering drumbeat of war on Iraq. I say thousands, but I know the crowd was actually of tens of thousands of people--certainly more than large enough to fill a couple of stadiums.

I have been to marches at the Mall before. I know what thousands of people look like. This crowd was most certainly about 100,000 people. When I got home today, I expected that after such a large number of anti-war protests around the world (in San Francisco, Rome, Paris, New York), there would be news coverage about it. The only coverage I saw was CNN Headline News' 10-second snippet in which they failed to focus on anything other than the fact that it was Jesse Jackson speaking. I won't even say anything about their failure to mention that there was a very sizable march after the rally. But at least Headline News covered it. NBC didn't even mention it, although they did spend 10 minutes on sniper coverage (late-breaking speculation about motives). News Channel 8, the local news channel, didn't bring it up. MSNBC hasn't mentioned it on the TV, and what they have on their website is AP coverage. Now the AP coverage is probably the most comprehensive I've read, with actual attempts at suggesting that the numbers were close to what they seemed to be. But no visuals! Despite all the mobile units and choppers and cameras! Despite the fact that we've had weeks on end of live, from-the-scene coverage when as much as someone sneezed in a way that sounded like "sniper". I've written much about the ways in which the media privilege certain stories over others. But this, friends, is absurd. The Redskins got more coverage than the march today!