raise your hand if you support protesting kavenaugh and his SC buddies everywhere they go

[summer_in_TX]

145. Massive protest rallies can work. Depends.

I've participated in many, from those against the Vietnam War and for Civil Rights. Those were very effective over time. Especially the Civil Rights marches because of the morally persuasive voice of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was in the heyday of protest marches.

TV coverage of the Vietnam War and the protests and the peaceful civil rights marchers (even little kids) being firehosed, having dogs used against them, and beatings and arrests helped.

The police riots of the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968 was a disaster for political opinion and sympathies. The media didn't show the root causes and framed it as out of control hippies. That did a lot to harden pro-police attitudes in the public.

In 1981, 7 months after giving birth to my first son, I had him in a stroller with a sign at the Texas Capitol for a rally against Reagan's budget cuts and the hardship they were causing. His pic was taken as the youngest protester there. In 1984 when Reaganomics caused millions of Americans to become homeless, TV covered the causes and problems that caused formerly middle-class Americans to lose their homes.

But after the proliferation of cable channels and the gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, little sustained coverage of issues occurred. During the Iraq War protests, I participated in many, even flew to DC for one. Wasn't covered on TV and there was only three paragraphs on it in the Washington Post. There was a huge 20K plus protest in NYC that I learned about and watched that stretched for many blocks, but coverage was limited to obscure cable channels. None of the protests made a dent.

I started to realize that the media is just as important as the protests are in getting the public behind the issue. If they just focus their cameras on the counter-protesters instead of opening wide the camera lenses to show the entire protest, the media are influencing their audience. That began happening a lot, after changes in media regulations – not to mention changing financial interests in outcomes.

The Women's Marches during the Trump presidency got some national coverage. Massive ones in Austin at the same time got some coverage, but not as much as you might have thought. Of course, many TV channels covered the worst excesses of some of our protesters and didn't widen the lens often at all to show the truth.

Same with many of the BLM protests until George Floyd's murder. And even still the media distorted quite a few of those. Violence marred those and made them less clear-cut than we wanted (of course a lot of that was Boogaloo Bois and agents provocateurs).

After the Parkland school massacres, gun issues began to get sustained television coverage, as did the marches. They've been having an impact on the national conversation, registered a lot of new voters, and, thank God, finally some legislation. Not as much as we want, but a start.

Now, abortion rights as an issue is massive and because of the 50 year history and the fact that this is the first time in America a broadly held right has been taken away, it's getting a lot of coverage. Our massive rallies help. They keep our energy up, helping us organize and register voters, educate women and others on aspects of why the law hurts women and little girls, and whole family systems too. Not all protests have made further organizing, voter registration, and GOTV main priorities.

But the press could easily turn off positive coverage of the issue. They can cover extreme behavior and political intimidation and turn their lenses away from the important issues. They shape public perception to a very large degree and we need them to tell the sympathetic stories. We don't need them to shift to the story of these poor judges who are being harassed in public places unrelentingly, and media news people losing sympathy with women and their supporters.