Events here in Athens are not always accurately reported in the international press. With that in mind, I sent a report to stateside friends Sunday, following the worldwide peace marches. The report, slightly edited below, was based on watching 5.5 hours of live coverage on the second state channel, NET. I also taped the second 'disruption' noted below.

Although not as exciting as being in the actual march, watching the raw TV coverage gave an overview of the event, its proportions and the immediate journalists' reaction to events as they occurred. I did not attempt to be colourful in this report, merely to set down events as I saw them.

Athens
15 February, 03

By police and media estimates, about 150,000 people gathered about noon, on a very chilly day, for just over two hours of speeches and music. The program was followed by another 3 hours of march.

In perspective, that's one of the largest demonstrations here in the past 30 years, and there were parallel events in 20 or more towns around Greece. The crowd included a good number of senior citizens, people who

Connie Hammond, a principal organizer for the Columbus march against war in Iraq last Saturday, estimated that 800 people attended the rally.

Perhaps like me, you watched the evening TV news to see what kind of coverage the protest got. It was dismal. Channels 4, 6 and 10 ran five to ten minutes of stories about snow, followed by about two minutes on the international protests. The local march got about 10 seconds max. Aside from the brevity of the coverage, the message of the protesters was trivialized by focussing on arrests at demos. Perhaps it was just me, but the anchors seemed to editorialize on "what the protesters believe" in such a way as to indicate that the viewer was expected to believe otherwise.

The Dispatch was not much better. Okay, so the Sunday edition had a front page piece "Millions make Case for Peace", which included a whole column-inch telling us where the three central Ohio demos were, but they also ran two pieces to incite war: one on the Iraqi war plan, and one on US proposals to "prove" Iraq is in violation of UNSCR 1441.

One of the big media buzzwords to emerge in recent years is "globalization." By now, we're likely to know what it means. That's unfortunate -- because at this point the word is so ambiguous that it doesn't really mean much of anything.

News outlets have reported that key international pacts like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization gained U.S. approval during the 1990s because most politicians in Washington favor "globalization." According to conventional media wisdom, those globalizers want to promote unfettered communication and joint endeavors across national boundaries.

Well, not quite. These days, at the White House and on Capitol Hill, the same boosters of "globalization" are upset about certain types of global action -- such as the current grassroots movement against a war on Iraq.

For the most part, the same elected officials and media commentators who have applauded money-driven globalization are now appalled by the sight of anti-war globalization. The recent spectacle of millions of people demonstrating against war on the same day around the world was enough to cause apoplexy at the White House.

Dylan Hallsmith, a sixth-grade student at St. Michael's School in Montpelier, Vermont, started his own campaign to support Congressman Dennis Kucinich while he considers running for the White House. Called "Kids for Kucinich," the campaign is targeted at young people nationwide, voters and non-voters alike.

"Congressman Kucinich cares about the future, and that's where we're all going to live." Dylan said. "He's concerned about education, the environment, about worker's rights, about civil rights. And most important, he wants to stop war. War is bad for everything." Congressman Kucinich is one of the sponsors of a bill that would create a Department of Peace.

Hallsmith met Kucinich when he came to speak at a Peace Summit at the University of Vermont in September last year. At the Peace Summit, Kucinich talked about how young people need to do something if they want to have a voice in their future. In a dramatic demonstration, Kucinich showed the hundreds of young people who came how one candle can light up a room that was in darkness. "Every voice counts in a democracy," Hallsmith said.

The Bush administration is helping powerful interests weaken the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program, which forces old, dirty power plants and other facilities to install modern pollution controls. These changes will make it easier for 17,000 facilities to emit more pollution, resulting in more disease, death and damage to the environment.

Recently, there was a vote in U.S. Senate on the Edwards-Lieberman Clean Air Amendment, which would have blocked the first set of White House rollbacks of the New Source Review program. Unfortunately, the U.S. Senate defeated the Edwards Clean Air Amendment by a vote of 46 to 50.

While we didn't win on this vote, this was an impressive vote count that sends a strong message to the White House that the public is opposed to efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act.

The next step is to demonstrate public opposition to the Bush administration's second set of proposed changes to the New Source Review Program. The first set of changes undermines this key clean air protection program, but the second set of proposed rules goes even farther and virtually eliminates the New Source Review program.