It looked ready to be one of the defining moments of the 2004 Republican Convention. On August 31, outside the Herald Square studios of “Hardball With Chris Matthews†at the corner of 34th St. and 7th Avenue, protesters were massing to vent their rage at Republican delegates. The crowd surged forward, the NYPD pushed back, and sirens lit up the sky. Helicopters whirred. All this was barely visible outside over the shoulders of the Hardball anchors, and the sound of tumult pierced through the stage microphones. The face of Chris Matthews, the show’s host, had the slightly strained look of a man who was used to live TV but didn’t quite know what would happen next. As the Hardball cameras stood yards away from the massing demonstrators, the stage seemed set for an epic media spectacle, a “whole world is watching†moment for the 21st century.

Yet every time even a hint of disruption or confrontation emerged from over the shoulder of a Hardball host, the camera immediately jumped to another angle, away from the sight, or into the convention, whether the camera pan made sense or not. On stage, Matthews continued to burble political platitudes punctuated by moments of meaningless political rage. As the guests droned, the confrontation in Herald Square grew larger. At one point, dozens of protesters blocked a delegate bus, forcing the started Missourians to trapse to the Garden on foot. Hundreds of protesters were eventually arrested in Herald Square alone. Still the cameras avoided showing the drama unfolding only a few yards away. Finally, a single masked demonstrator leaped onto the stage “soybomb†style, and was immediately tackled by show security. Dragged away, the political banter continued like nothing had happened.

Such was the not-so-new dilemma faced by tens of thousands of activists and ordinary New Yorkers determined to broadcast their disgust with the Bush agenda to the world. The choice was not a new one. Mass violence or property destruction would capture cameras at the risk of delegitimizing the protest itself or even helping Republicans. Peaceful protest, or even non-violent civil disobedience, ran the risk of being ignored.

Neither side of the political confrontation this week in New York seemed happy with either of these choices; indeed, the protests surrounding the RNC remained something poorly understood, both by the media and the City of New York. Hundreds of thousands of people peacefully protesting a convention? The idea seemed absurd. Even stranger seemed the notion of the old chestbut “non-violent civil disobedience.†Non-violent civil disobedience went out of style with Martin Luther King, with the final nail the coffin being hammered in at the 1968 Democratic Convention in New York.

Indeed, the corporate media’s obsession with 1968 was perhaps the biggest hindrance in its reporting of the events in New York this week. The New York Times was (unintentionally) exactly on point when it quoted Ted Koppel on Wednesday, who said that “it is almost easier to explain what you are not getting here … What you are not getting here is a replay of 1968 in Chicago.†So spoke the corporate press, content to say what the RNC protests were not and leave it at that, rather than take a harder look at what the protests actually were. Some facts: half a million in a peaceful Sunday march, continual acts of visual and artistic defiance staring out the windows of New York apartments, non-stop harassment of delegates, a palpable city-wide disgust with the Republican party, a massive day of civil disobedience, the most arrests ever at a political convention, a powerful network of independent media, a revitalized left-wing political community in the Big Apple.

One final irony. The corporate media’s poor performance over the last few days mattered little—probably less than it ever has. Almost five years ago global justice activists, faced with the specter of similar media malfeasance on the streets of Seattle, dropped once and for all the notion of petitioning the corporate press for a few seconds of airtime and urged ordinary people to be their own media. Over the intervening years, the independent media network they envisioned has grown by leaps and bounds, and was on full display in the heart of New York this week. A 24-hour webstream. Live reports from the streets. Up to the minute text messaging and breaking news. A nightly TV show. The largest distribution of a radical newspaper in the last 40 years. A huge convergence space organized by Paper Tiger and NYC Indymedia. Millions of internet visitors. And at the same time the corporate media, so dismissive of the activity in the streets, relentlessly scanned the New York Indymedia website looking for the latest news.

It would be foolish to claim that the majority of people learned what happened during the RNC from independent media activists in New York. A huge number of Americans continue to receive their news from an increasingly homogenized corporate press. Nevertheless, the trend away from the mainstream monoliths continues. The RNC in New York was another step in that direction.