undreds of thousands of people took to the streets in what was the biggest protest there in many a year, but you would scarcely have known that from our mainstream media.

One week later in Rome, 1.5 million Italians protested, but again barely a story.

The very next day, in the United States, there were protests all over the place. In New York City, 15,000 people gathered, and Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon and Howard Zinn all addressed the crowd.

Guess where that story ran?

On page B-3 of The New York Times, and The Washington Post put it in its "Nation in Brief" section, as Steve Rendall of FAIR has noted. (FAIR's media coverage is invaluable. Check it out at www.fair.org.)

Also on the weekend of October 5-6, there were 3,000 people in Los Angeles, 5,000 in San Francisco, 5,000 in Portland, and hundreds more at events in cities and towns all over the country.

But even though the protests obviously have a national dimension, the mainstream media are snoring.

Just this last Sunday, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, went to give a talk at Middlebury College in Vermont, and he was greeted by 1,500 protesters. Sounds like a story to me, but you didn't read about this in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I found out about it on the Internet, and then came across one story: It was on the AP state and local wire.

The practice of the major media seems to be: first, ignore the protests, then, undercount them, then belittle them by suggesting college kids will be college kids, or they have '60s envy.

But the protests today are larger than they were at a comparable period before the Vietnam War got going; they are intergenerational and multiracial, and they are drawing people who have never come to protests before.

The media are failing at their jobs to inform the public, and thus they are giving citizens a narrow and distorted view of the world. And by not reporting on the protests, they may be dampening the spirits of some of the citizenry, who may feel alone and despondent in their belief that this war is madness.

Beyond that, by blowing this story, the media end up getting egg on their face, as when last week 133 members of the House voted against the war resolution, a number far higher than anyone in the Washington media expected, as John Nichols of The Nation tells me. Because of the peace movement, calls were running 9-to-1, 10-to-1, even 20-to-1 opposed to the war. It would have taken only a little bit of legwork to find this out, and then to realize that there's something big happening right now.

Given this lack of coverage, the magnitude and intensity of the anti-war protests are even more amazing to behold.

As the protests grow, some of the recalcitrant and dismissive media will have to take note. And if we do our work well, ultimately Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush will, too.

-- Matthew Rothschild

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