On the surface, the upcoming WTO meeting looked like a snooze for news junkies, with its closed-door sessions of faceless bureaucrats debating esoteric topics lacking in immediate and direct impact on ordinary people. So in order to draw attention to their objections, the protesters applied some longstanding principles of news-making that would leave the assembled journalists with no choice but to put their views in the spotlight.

The media love sound and fury, regardless of who is telling the tale. So the protest organizers plotted a show that journalists couldn't resist. They crafted a narrative that would pit populist Davids against multinational corporate Goliaths. They put out press releases to alert the audience to the coming extravaganza. Then they put on a spectacle replete with the color and conflict tha

This is the political equivalent to the oldest adage in advertising: 'I don't care what you say about me, so long as you spell my name right.' As the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach put it on Thursday: "Regardless of whether they're right or wrong, a riot... is an effective method of generating coverage of a grievance. This story was on the front of the financial pages just a couple of days ago. Officially boring! If you march in an orderly line, you're always going to be in the back of the news queue.' But this is more than a matter of redirecting the coverage. In the process, the media can't help but legitimize new sources and viewpoints. At a conference where the news would have been funneled through prepared speeches and press secretaries, previously unknown protesters are getting their names on reporters' Rolodexes. After years of treating Pat Buchanan as the unofficial spokesman for those disenchanted with free trade and international bureaucracies, the Post ran a front-page story on

The result? The performers took the stage, the journalists took the bait, and the rest is the first rough draft of history. The protests started on Monday. Since then, the big three network evening newscasts have aired 29 stories on the conference, all but six of which focused either heavily or exclusively on the protests.

The coverage was not particularly sympathetic to the

Some common words found in the essay are:
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