What @zenvelo said + at least some coverage from the corporate media. I’ve been involved in protests up to 750,000k people. It was mostly peaceful, and nobody I knew over the age of 25 even knew it happened. And during the leadup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the unprecedented global protests, including tens of thousands of us in the streets of Boston, received very little coverage other than a scene of an anarchist throwing something. I had friends in Seattle that took part in the 1999 WTO protests, and they called me fearing for their lives. “The police are just grabbing people, smashing their heads open, and arresting them.” The corporate media coverage I got back east was of a couple of anarchists breaking the windows of a Starbucks.
Not only does the media need to accurately represent the protest, it needs to present the issues that have sparked the protests in detail. Often, people feel that taking to the street in large numbers is the only way to get attention when the media is not functioning properly. Only with sustained organized effort, however, can these actions start to make a difference in media coverage (as in the case of the civil rights movement).
A democracy is only as good as good as its media.