PROGRESSIVE DEMONSTRATION IN NORTH CAROLINA IGNORED BY "LIBERAL MEDIA," WIDELY MOCKED BY RIGHT

Up to 100,000 demonstrated in North Carolina on Saturday against the radical right turn taken by the state government in the past couple of years -- a demonstration described by Think Progress as "the massive progressive protest you didn't hear about this weekend":

Somewhere between 80 to 100,000 people from 32 states turned out to protest four years of drastic state Republican initiatives in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday.

The "Moral March on Raleigh," organized by Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ), marched from Shaw University to the state capitol to push back against the "immoral and unconstitutional policies" of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory during the 2013 NC General Assembly session. Since North Carolina Republicans took over both legislative chambers in 2010, legislators have eliminated a host of programs and raised taxes on the bottom 80 percent, repealed a tax credit for 900,000 working families, enforced voter suppression efforts, blocked Medicaid coverage, cut pre-Kindergarten funding, cut federal unemployment benefits, and gave itself the authority to intervene in abortion lawsuits.

The so-called liberal media certainly did ignore this demonstration. I see no coverage of this in The New York Times, none from CNN. A few days ago, it got mentioned by The Washington Post in a story in the Religion section picked up from Religion News Service, but there's been no coverage of the demonstration since it took place.

You know who covered this demonstration? The right.

Oh, I shouldn't give the impression that the right-wing noise machine covered the demonstration. The right-wing noise machine pointed out one aspect of the demonstration. Here's the lead story at Fox Nation right now:





Everyone on the right thinks this is hilarious -- the Daily Caller and Glenn Beck's Blaze and Townhall and Alex Jones's Prison Planet and on and on. Here's what the righties find so risible:

#MoralMarch will protest NC's new "racist" #VoterID, but you're req'd to bring photo ID to the march. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/w14mzejdSn

— Stacey-SisterToldjah (@sistertoldjah) February 8, 2014

I seriously doubt that anyone was turned away for not having an ID, just as I'm sure no one was kept off the bus for not knowing the bus number and the names of the marshals and bus captains. I'm sure that the organizes of the demo, unlike the state of North Carolina, consider a college ID "valid." Most important, I think this recommendation was made on the assumption that if anything went wrong, demonstrators, might have to deal with authority figures of the same state that finds them so suspicious at the polls. Even peaceful protesters might have had to deal with the cops if other demonstrators caused any trouble (or were perceived as having done so). So it was a reasonable recommendation -- though, yes, the organizers should have acknowledged that some demonstrators might lack ID (by adding "if you have it" to that last bullet point).

*****

It's probably unreasonable to expect the mainstream media to cover this protest movement: it's not violent, nor is it (by conventional standards) heartwarming. More to the point, it doesn't involve a lot of white upmarket residents of the West Coast or the Northeast. The mainstream media cares about D.C. politicians and New Jersey's Chris Christie and Greenwich Village's Philip Seymour Hoffman. Nobody in the media cares about a largely black protest movement in (ugh!) North Carolina.

Nobody, that is, except the right.