The Aftermath

Although I was uncomfortable with some of the slogans, chants and placards of the anti-war demonstrators – not so much because I disagreed with them, but because I felt they alienated much of the American populace who might otherwise protest the war – I left Washington, DC, inspired by the most impressive display of civic resolve I had ever experienced in the United States. According to police estimates, well over 100,000 gathered people gathered in what was the biggest anti-war rally since the Vietnam era.

Back in New York, I turned on CNN headline news to find that it was the number three story of the day, just after the storming of the theatre in Moscow where Chechen gunmen were holding patrons hostage and the plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone. But CNN's piece portrayed the rally as a few thousand people marching through the streets chanting, "George Bush, You Can't Hide, We Charge You With Genocide." While there was no denying some protesters chanted these words or that the demonstration was almost as much anti-Bush as it was anti-war, CNN's coverage badly mis-portrayed both the numbers and the overall tone of the rally. A day later, the New York Times, a newspaper that has set the gold standard in journalism because of its reliability, ran a short story on page 8 headlined, "Thousands March in Washington against Going to War in Iraq."

It seemed odd that something so momentous – that attracted so many different kinds of people from across the eastern seaboard and beyond – merited so little attention.





• Stacy Sullivan is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of the forthcoming book From Brooklyn to Kosovo with Love and Guns.

• Joseph Rodriguez is freelance photojournalist and a roving correspondent for PixelPress. His third publication, Juvenile Justice will be published by PowerHouse Books next year.

This is the first in an ongoing series of PixelPress Assignments.