It's common to look back at a story and wonder why it was given so much play, or to question how reporters could have missed something monumental happening right in front of their faces.
For the most part, the March on Washington was not one of those moments. People knew it was something big.
In "The Race Beat," their history of the media's coverage of the civil rights movement, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff tally up the relatively vast amount of resources that newspapers and radio stations and television networks devoted to the march.
There were, they write, around 3,100 police or press passes given to journalists on the scene. The big three television networks, together with the Mutual Broadcasting radio service, sent 460 people to capture video and audio. NBC aired eleven special reports throughout the day. CBS ran the whole thing all the way through. It was broadcast live to six countries.
