News of the protests in Madison is so absent, everybody is starting to notice. I worry about the protesters, I wanted to know how they were doing. I checked Saturday on CNN, NYtimes, and a string of other web sites I don’t remember. Nothing noticeable. That’s odd, I thought. You’d think this would be the biggest story in the country. We devoted a lot of time to Egypt.

Sunday I knew there was a deadline to evict the protesters from the Madison Capitol. I was anxious how that would go down and tried to find out.

Nothing. That was more than odd. That was bizarre. “Showdown at the Capitol” had to be newsworthy for our infantile media. But apparently it wasn’t. That made no sense.

So I started searching around. I discovered First Draft, reporting from the ground. It was sounding more like Egypt every day, in the organization of the protesters and the sympathy of the ones behind the guns. Susie Madrak noted a march, 100,000 strong, a hundred thousand, had taken place on Saturday in temperatures well below freezing. Huh? And that hadn’t been anywhere near the front page? What was this? A conspiracy of silence?

And then more and more people pointed it out. Corrente, Digby, also here. Now Krugman pointed out how much this feels like the media chorus leading up to the Iraq War.

This is a chorus of silence, but it’s also a chorus of misdirection, just like that earlier massive failure. They say, “It’s about money.” No, the unions agreed to the outrageous pay cuts to finance tax cuts for Governor Walker’s campaign contributors. They’re refusing to give up collective bargaining rights. It’s about rights, not money. “It’s about greedy unions.” No, it’s not. it’s about greedy Governors and their millionaire beneficiaries. We either hear no news, or we hear the wrong news.

As I mentioned a while ago, I come from a Russian family. I visited the Soviet Union back in the day. Friends there told us how you had to crouch over the faint voice of the BBC on a shortwave radio to get any news. That, or perhaps you’d hear something in letters from friends or the occasional leaflet. And now, here we are. The only difference that I can see is that the Russians all knew they were being lied to.