By David Helvarg*
Tom PaineOctober 29, 2002
I went down to the Vietnam Memorial last Saturday and for the first hour or so it looked like the demonstration against a possible war on Iraq wasn't coming together. There were only about 10,000 people gathered there, which is what NPR went on to report as the size of the protest. That's also when The New York Times reporter must have split.
How else could you explain her claim in last Sunday's paper (in a small story on page 8) that the protest drew fewer than organizers had hoped for? They said they hoped for 100,000 and by three in the afternoon, when people began marching, that seemed about right. After 30 years of crowd estimating, I've gotten pretty good at this numbers game, even if I haven't seen the meek making much headway in their inheritance dispute with the Bush, bin Laden, Putin and other family claimants.
I stood on a wall for an hour watching a boulevard-wide procession of citizens passing by with music, banners, placards expressing anger, fear and hope. My favorite sign read, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
About half the protestors seemed to be under 25, including a cheerleading squad all the way from Indiana's Earlham College who chanted, "THIS is what democracy looks like." As Jesse Jackson pointed out at the pre-march rally, youth isn't the hope of tomorrow, they're the hope of right now.
The D.C. police chief called this the largest anti-war march since Vietnam. In an only-in-America sort of thing, the Park Police stopped providing official crowd estimates on D.C. protests after they were threatened with a lawsuit. San Francisco police said over 40,000 demonstrators marched -- organizers said over 80,000 -- in Baghdad by the Bay. Thousands more marched in wet, raw Portland, Maine, and in Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado and around the world.
So are mass protests against a possible major war big news right before an election? Nah... Seems like you have to be a sniper to get noticed anymore. At least that's the message I got from the anemic media coverage. The two alleged snipers were still top-of-the-fold in The New York Times and The Washington Post days after their arrests while reports of a renewed anti-war movement got buried by the daily press, the networks and the cable newsmouths. Local D.C. news stations led their evening telecasts with snipers, a carjacking, and the upcoming Marine Corps Marathon before mentioning that tens of thousands of people had that day taken to the streets of the Capital.
The further you got from the New York/Washington media vortex, however, the less restrictive the coverage appeared. The protests got major play on the West Coast and in Europe. Listener-supported Pacifica Radio also did extensive coverage. Pacifica's tireless Amy Goodman was in D.C., doing many interviews in a tent just off the stage. The "liberal media" that conservatives love to whine about is, if Lilliputian, at least out there, alive.
In his classic study of modern media, Deciding What's News, sociology professor Herb Gans wrote that American media share common values, including maintaining social order and strong national leadership. That would explain why network field-producers kept cutting away from shots of protestors lining the route of George Bush's inaugural parade after his Supreme Court mandated presidential victory in 2000. Crowds carrying signs reading "Hail to the thief" and "Illegitimate" do not help restore faith in the established order.
It would also explain why, if both parties in Congress agree on transferring their war powers to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, citizens' worries and protests won't get much media traction.
There was one particular Democratic politician, also a one-time professor, who had the courage to stand up in the Senate and say no. He argued that a unilateral war on Iraq might actually make the United States more isolated, vulnerable and at risk of attack. Unfortunately Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter and five others died in a plane crash last week. On Oct. 26, one hundred thousand people held a moment of silence for him in D.C. The media didn't show that, but they were happy to provide us with shots of the wreckage.
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