more on the peace march coverage

further to my earlier post about the media coverage of the peace rally, theres been some back and forth about whether the peace rallies should have better discipline. i left the following comment over here:

"to give wolcott some credit, his point was mainly that the event didnt work so great on the teeve. gilliard's take-down however was inexcusable.

they are both right to argue that the Right has 'better message discipline' than us - they always will. we arent like that, thank fsm. the tv reports here in australia were something like 20 seconds for the 100k+ peace marches (one guy with funny hair, and woman in a greenpeace' teeshirt, and the obligatory pic of a nun (which is mocking, somehow), 10 secs for the 200 pro-murder crew, and 10 seconds to show the one or two arrests. it always will be thus, even if we have absolute message discipline - and if there werent any arrests, the media would have to discuss some trampled flowers or some such.

we will never have the discipline that the right has, and we dont want it - its not us, and we cant control the media - ergo, my best guess is that we need to co-opt the message that is being forced on us (like so many have before) - yep, we're diverse! lots of people are antiwar - hippies and mothers and nuns and kids and the mumia crowd and the haiti crowd and yuppies and foreigners et al - aka a broad cross-section of the public - and we need to build that message over time - particularly in advance of events, so that the tv watchers know what they can expect. thats the only game we can win at.

oh - and one other thing - i cant believe that hardly anyone mentioned the fact that the *ahem* Freedom Walk 2 weeks ago only got 5000 people. we should be celebrating that we outnumbered them by a factor of 20 or more, not complaining that we had so-called splinter groups which were larger than the pro-war crew could muster - despite the backing of WaPo and the other media companies and the DoD all backing their stupid little rally."