Reporting on the Democratic National Convention and the protests that accompanied it, the Washington Post declared: "Smothered by police, straggling through smog and heat, the protest movement that exploded late last year on the rainy streets of Seattle fizzled out here last week." The Post's writers droned on that the activists' thinking was foggy: "The sheer diversity of protest issues on display muddled the movement's message."

Let's see: Several thousand activists converge on the Democrats' convention, where private bankrolling of the party that claims to stand up to the powerful on behalf of the weak is at its most obvious and intense. To kick things off, protesters unfurl a banner directly across from the convention center: a U.S. flag with corporate logos instead of stars, and the words "Soldout USA." Pretty muddled stuff.

On the Santa Monica pier, people from Global Exchange and their allies, poked "for sale" signs into the sand around a DNC booze-up funded by defense contractor Raytheon and tobacco felon Philip Morris. (So much for the PR that the Dems would touch no cash from the cancer lobby.) The D2K Coalition, which organized the biggest protests in L.A., joined striking workers outside a Loews Hotel, where low-wage employees are in a bitter battle with a CEO who is a major contributor to Gore.

It takes a concerted effort to muddle a message as plain as this. As the week progressed, one demonstration after another condemned corporate dominance over civic life, from the overpaying of politicians and the underpaying of workers, to sweatshops, pollution and the funding of for-profit prisons instead of public schools.

Conservative media, including the Post, rarely permit progressives to air their views in full. Like television broadcasters, reluctant to cover activism at all, they tend to cover protesters as they would wildlife: Activists appear as strange-looking creatures whose natural habitat is a dusty street, their language a staccato string of slogans, chanted or yelled, accompanied by a fist clenched in the air. Prevented from uttering full sentences, their views are criticized as simplistic or unclear. Indeed, the very same folks who complained that the L.A. protesters muddled their message, resolutely ignored the substance of what they had to say.

After all, L.A. activists did not just carry placards, they ran a veritable message machine. As in Philadelphia, the Independent Media Center (IMC) packaged "message" in every medium: radio, video and print. Genuinely curious reporters could have taken their pick. In a new development, grassroots camcorder activists from groups like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in L.A. or Families Against Three Strikes collaborated with experienced mavericks from Paper Tiger/Deep Dish and FreeSpeech TV to produce two daily live television broadcasts that reached a potential audience of 21 million homes via satellite, public access cable and the Web. I suspect the corporate press just couldn't make sense of it: lots of non-white, non-old, non-clichéd Americans, speaking for themselves.

Some people in power were paying attention. On August 14, police responded to an alleged anarchist bomb threat by barring access to the IMC's satellite truck just long enough for the on-air time-slot to elapse. A member of the sheriff's department even quipped that the "threat would evaporate as soon as the satellite time elapsed." And it did.

Later, the LAPD begged the IMC to remove the announcement they had had posted in place of programming during the shut-down, which explained that LAPD intervention had stopped the broadcast. Thousands of calls were apparently coming into their office, and callers had jammed up their lines. The Post ignored that story.

Some reporters I spoke to seemed genuinely frustrated. Excited to be assigned to the demonstration "beat," they found their editors would only run stories about arrests and conflict, not the protesters' point of view.

The one street event that got full coverage was the police riot outside the DNC site on August 14. The Los Angeles Times reported that police fired indiscriminately on a peaceful crowd for more than an hour that night. Unleashing a torrent of rubber bullets, batons and pepper spray on retreating protesters and the press may have looked like an odd way for the scandal-ridden LAPD to re-assert its competence, but it actually accomplished two things: It ensured that activists and party faithful would never meet, and it established "violence" as the media's trope of the week.

The big news in Los Angeles should have been the relative lack of violence, given the out-of-control nature of the real black bloc--the uniformed LAPD and their undercover "scouts" who infiltrated the protesters' ranks. Far from smothered by police, skilled organizers used every tool in their nonviolence handbook to minimize conflict in an incendiary situation. "It's frustrating," one high school organizer told me late one night, as police circled the activists' convergence center, eventually arresting two stragglers for jaywalking. "All the trouble they cause distracts from the issues."

Fizzled out? I don't think so. I'd say a battle was joined.

Laura Flanders was the host of "Crashing The Party," the nightly broadcast of the IMC.