a Mantilla, writing for Off Our Backs, noted that the largest demonstration in world history took place February 15, 2003, when an estimated 10 million people in more than 600 cities around the world, including more than 100 U.S. cities, simultaneously protested the build-up to the Iraq war. Nonetheless, Mantilla and numerous other media experts noted, that despite these large, well-organized demonstrations, traditional media forums engaged in and encouraged very little debate on the underlying issues of the peace movement. In fact, in an address to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University on April 4, 2003, media expert and curator of the Nieman Foundation, Bob Giles, pointed out that only in the face of continued and growing public dissent did both the New York Times and the Washington Post acknowledge that they had "underplay[ed] major anti-war demonstrations" in their news coverage. For example, after one such protest of more than 100,000 people in Washington, D.C., the Washington Post did not run a story on its front page. In a subsequent "mea culpa," of sorts, the Post's Ombudsman noted that a story ran "halfway down the front page of the Metro section, with a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest's fringe elements" (Getler, 2002, p. B6). The mea culpa only occurred after protestors wrote into the newspaper complaining about the lack of coverage.
Giles argued that the lack of such coverage was due to a fear of public disapproval. For example, despite the large peace protests, traditional media forums relied on surveys such as one of 6,400 viewers that found news coverage of antiwar protests rated last in a list of war-related topics (Jessell, 2003, p. 1). U.S. President Bush also provided support for the low-key media coverage by essentially dismissing the importance of the peace movement when he stated that being swayed by the protests was akin to "like deciding, well, I'm going to deci...