Masking death

On Saturday, perhaps as many as 10,000 people marched along Hollywood Boulevard to voice opposition to the ongoing carnage in Iraq and call for Congress to bring American troops home before any more have to die.

Following performances by Ben Harper, Jackson Browne and Ozomatli and appearances by actors Martin Sheen and Laura Dern, who is married to Harper, those chosen to take the stage at the end of the rally included nearly a dozen veterans of the conflict.

Their message: “It's time for an immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq,” said Army National Guard Sgt. Jabbar Magruder, a 24-year-old helicopter mechanic from Los Angeles who is on active duty.

Added former Air Force Senior Airman Tim Goodrich: “You can't say people who are against the war are against the troops, because we are the troops.”

But if you weren't reading this newspaper, you probably wouldn't know much about Magruder or Goodrich, or for that matter what Sheen and the other artists had to say, on or offstage.

Blame the cursory nature of television news, the corporate masters of mainstream print outlets, the protesters themselves or even all the drunken St. Patrick's Day revelers, but the truth is that since before the war began, hundreds of thousands of people have marched against the war right here in Los Angeles with little substantive coverage by local media.

This weekend, apart from a few exceptions, wasn't much different.

At 10 p.m. Saturday, Los Angeles Times sister news outlet KTLA led with a live report by Jim Nash from O'Brien's Irish Pub in Santa Monica: Lots of drunks, some who slurred their words as they spoke about the snakes that St. Patrick supposedly chased off the Emerald Isle. Then there was the good news for those who like to gamble, with a report that UCLA beat Indiana to enter NCAA Basketball's Sweet 16. Next up, DUI checkpoints were operating around the Southland for all those drunks we just saw. And rescue crews saved a woman in a car accident in which alcohol played a role.

And then there was another car bomb, a new type of device laced with chlorine, in Iraq, which, finally, brought us back home to Hollywood and the anti-war protest that had occurred there just minutes from that station's headquarters a street over on Sunset Boulevard.

Although he didn't personally select the order of stories for that broadcast, KTLA News Director Jeff Wald said Tuesday that the demonstration probably should have gotten more attention.

“When I watched, I got the same feeing you did. It seemed kind of not in the right place, even though more people were expected to show up,” said Wald, who recalled that his newsroom was told to expect more than 100,000 in attendance. “Given the mood of the country and that it was the anniversary of the Iraqi War, it probably should have been played higher.”

Initially, Channels 2, 4, 5, and 7 teased viewers with news of “hundreds” of protesters, then reported there were thousands of people, then finally settled on 6,000, a number that still seemed much smaller than the actual sea of people that flooded the streets of Hollywood that day.

Sunday's Times carried 11 paragraphs on the demonstration, eventually homing in on the fact that some people showed up in pretty strange costumes and that a pro-war tourist from Ohio delighted in the “freak show” (insert yawn here).

The LA Daily News' Brent Hopkins did a more thorough job, with 21 paragraphs and an Iraq veteran at the top, 300 words above any mention of all those funky characters and the tiny group of Bush supporters who showed up to call Magruder, Goodrich and the several thousand others “a bunch of nickel brains … idiots, who don't know what they're talking about.”

Neither publication expended any ink on appearances by actors Sheen, Dern or the performances by Browne, Harper and Ozomatli.

Dern, who most recently starred in David Lynch's “Inland Empire,” was happy to see the Pasadena Weekly.

“The most exciting thing is when I see media out here, because the media coverage of marches in previous years has been horrifying,” she said, recalling her disappointment after one march in Washington that drew several thousand people but earned no more than a ticker-tape mention on CNN.

“People have to know their voice counts, and every individual deserves to use their voice as loud as they can. Whether it's writing … or getting out and marching or supporting media that gets the real news out, these are the things we have to do now,” said Dern, who arrived with her 5-year-old son, Ellery. “It seems immoral not to use our voices.”

But seeing those voices go generally ignored is nothing new to Peter Hart, a director of the New York-based media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), who actually received a few phone calls from Los Angeles complaining about protest coverage here.

“Journalists see protesters as people who do something to try to gain their attention outside of the normal political exercises, so they're ambivalent to covering it. They end up treating these people like children,” he said. “When the voiceless start raising their voices, they don't want to hear it — certainly don't want to write about it. The editorial position is that this thing isn't going to be covered, no matter what.”

Hart also referred to frequent emphasis on small counter-protests in news reports as “false balance” that twists the truth by giving equal time to both arguments despite a vast disparity in numbers, much the way the opinions of a few scientists who deny global warming are often given equal weight to the tens of thousands who believe in it.

The news outlet with the most prominent demonstration coverage on Saturday appeared to be KNBC, which ran a 90-second lede story about the event at 5 p.m. before editing it down for a No. 2 spot for the 11 p.m. broadcast.

“If 5,000 people showed up to support the troop surge, I might be more startled, but certainly it's a major event. Scheduled events every editor has to be careful of because they're arranged often with us in mind. You approach any structured event by any special interest group with some skepticism and caution, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that a gathering of thousands on a pretty day in Hollywood was not worthy of attention,” said KNBC News Director Robert Long.

“I don't think anyone can argue this wasn't a very significant story. That's a lot of people to get together on a Saturday afternoon, and the fact it represents the majority opinion of this country doesn't mean it's not a story or a manifest of a significant sea change,” he added.

Long believes differences in the way stations cover certain events show the media is not the monolithic, sinister power it's often made out to be, especially by frustrated left-leaning activists.

Wald, too, is skeptical of such claims, describing KTLA's newsroom as diverse when it comes to political opinion.

“It's not like the [national] FOX News Channel, where you know they have a conservative bent on stories,” he said.

But if media can be taken as a whole on the national level, the handling of war-related stories happening both at home and abroad is generally marred by an extreme pro-government bias, according to Jon Stauber, founder and executive director of the Center for Media & Democracy in Madison, Wisc.

“The media totally blacked out the anti-war debate … became a cheerleading squad for pro-war propaganda. I don't think the media has ever done a good job in my lifetime of covering public opposition to American foreign policy,” said Stauber. “This is censorship, and for whatever reason, there's been a deliberate decision across the board by mainstream media to not cover anti-war protests.”

Joe Strupp, senior newsroom editor for the journalism trade magazine Editor & Publisher, has for years taken the media to task for not asking critical questions in the run-up to war, and also recognizes a reluctance to cover war protests. Strupp believes, however, that some less sinister reasons may have contributed to lacking coverage of this weekend's war protests, especially in places like New York and Washington, DC, that drew smaller crowds.

“Part of it is that traditional, out-in-the-street protesting isn't as great as it has been for other things in the past,” he said, recalling Vietnam-era tumult and even demonstrations about US policy in Central America that he participated in as a student.

Not only are people turning out in fewer numbers and acting out in less raucous ways, he said, the Internet and other alternative mediums have for many become the choice outlet of dissent.

“If you got half a million in Washington, or people blocking traffic… maybe 2,000 at the Capitol isn't such a big thing,” he said.  

But for many of those who took part in the Los Angeles demonstration — including 59-year old Pasadena handyman and activist Bob McBroom, who along with Sheen helped a Veterans for Peace contingent carry symbolic flag-draped coffins down Hollywood Boulevard — their voices are of great importance when it comes to reaching both the public and public officials straddling the fence on whether to start pulling troops out of Iraq.

“The feeling of taking part in an important action with thousands of people and not seeing anything about it in the news can breed a lot of cynicism,” said Hart.

Backstage at the demonstration's culmination in front of the Hollywood and Highland mall, Harper was thinking nearly the same thing as he tuned up for his performance.

“I need to be hopeful, and it's events like this that make me hopeful. The world has become incredibly efficient at making people feel hopeless and voiceless and powerless. It's moments like these that remind me we're anything but that. When people get together like this en masse and demand to be counted, there's an unavoidable, undeniable power in numbers, and I'm proud to be one in that number,” he said.

“It's not about black and white. It's not about blue and red. It's not about North and South. It's not about whether you drive an SUV or a hybrid. It's life and death at this point, man,” said Harper.

Former “West Wing” star and longtime Iraq war protester Sheen, whose message calling for criminal investigations of the Bush administration went unreported in the mainstream press, is unconvinced that protest is futile.

“We're not asked to be successful. We're only asked to be faithful … to the truth,” he said. “[The government] does not represent the people. It's given us an obscene war, and they have no leadership and no credibility. They are disgraceful. They all belong in a federal penitentiary — all of them,” he told the Weekly.

Browne, after a performance of several songs including a version of “Lives in the Balance,” also expressed a virulent disgust with the government — ideas also apparently too strong for readers of the Times and the Daily News, sound bytes apparently too crunchy for LA television viewers.

“I'd like to see Democrats subpoena members of the Bush administration. This is the most secretive and also the most corrupt government of all time. The prospect of actually investigating these crimes is what gives us hope,” he said.  

Said Harper, “the amount of pessimism and cynicism we're abused with everyday, you come out here and that's washed away.”