The majority isn't silent. But you'd never know it.

New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister, in a discussion with Chris Hayes and organizer Linda Sarsour, asked why the women's marches got so little media coverage.

"What do you want me to tell the crazy women talking about justice? They ignored us again but they will not ignore us at the ballot box," Sarsour said.

"This is right. This is symptomatic, the marches and the activism is not taken seriously. Why?" Traister asked.

"They are women's marches. We know last year single biggest one-day demonstration in this country's history, we heard how afterwards, it was okay but just a march, it's performance, fun, people get together and wear their cute hats, whatever. No one seems to have connected, still, a year later when there is a spontaneous demonstration almost the same size in some places like Chicago, bigger, without a centralized organization drawing everybody.

"I didn't know about the marches," she said. "I write about women and politics. I didn't know there would be women's marches until January and they were massive. They don't just have cute marches with the hats with the fact it's women clogging congressional phone lines and doing town halls, who have been organizing on the grassroots activist level around state and local office races around the country who have been winning in New Jersey, in Virginia and who are running in unprecedented numbers for the House, for the Senate and primarying Democrats from the left.

"And apparently, the media's failure to take this seriously as a political movement and not as some social weekend thing that women do once a year, has led Senate Democrats to think it's not a serious political movement," she said.

Later in the show, she compared them with the endless coverage sparked by the much smaller Tea Party and how the media helped make them a political force.

This Saturday was the second annual Women’s March. You might remember it. Perhaps you read a news story about it.

Or maybe, perchance, you even attended one. Lots of people did! In Los Angeles, an estimated 500,000 people took to the streets, and in Chicago, 300,000. New York City claimed 200,000. Even red states saw decent-size turnouts. Nashville saw 15,000 and Omaha 8,000.

But after the initial flurry of media attention — crickets. According to an analysis by Media Matters for America, the Sunday morning news shows all but ignored the mass event. “Meet the Press” granted the subject a mere 20-second exchange — and the NBC show was the most generous of the lot.

While it’s common sense to observe that the government shutdown is taking up some of our oxygen, the lack of attention also demonstrates how even with the #MeToo movement, it is ingrained to treat the concerns of women as secondary to, well, bigger things that are deemed more serious. And when opposition to the Trump administration and the Republican Party is framed as a women’s issue, it receives less attention than it should.



I reached out to McDermott to expand on his Twitter comment. He told me he attributed the lack of attention to the Women’s March in part to the media’s conviction, in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, that journalists missed the initial surge of populist rage that led to Trump’s victory and are attempting, as he put it, “to course correct,” by diverting media attention to Trump’s angry male supporters. At the same time, he added, the media often prioritizes the issues of concerns of white males. The result?

“There is not coverage of the actual movement building on the left, which is arguably by any measure the greatest political movement we’ve seen in decades in this country,” he said.

It’s hard to disagree.

By all objective standards, the rage of many women against Trump has been big news since the 2017 march, which took almost everyone — including organizers — by surprise.

It set off a never-before-seen wave of women running for office. According to Rebecca Traister, 439 women have announced plans to run for Congress this year, marking an all-time record. The #MeToo movement also owes some of its resonance to the waves of women organizing, registering to vote and making their anger heard.

It’s hard not to compare the attention — and lack thereof — to the Women’s March against the attention given to the tea party, the movement that seemingly garnered all-but-nonstop coverage from the moment it began as a rant by CNBC personality Rick Santelli. Soon enough, there was enormous amount of media attention devoted to tea party rallies and the protesters’ concerns. In 2011, after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, CNN not only aired the official Republican response, it also gave time to then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who delivered a tea party response.

Make no mistake — the attention was deserved. Tea party members made major electoral gains, and the tea party is still an influence in our politics.

But the Women’s March and the resistance that engendered it are also having a huge impact on American politics. We saw that impact in the November 2017 elections, in which a surge of female support led to huge Democratic gains in Virginia. We also saw it in Alabama, where it was African American woman who helped Democrat Doug Jones win election to the Senate instead of Republican Roy Moore.