To watch and read the media coverage this week of the democratic race for the White House, one would conclude that the results of the Oregon and Kentucky primaries were the big news. However, there was another event that said more about where things stand than the vote counting did. Barrack Obama drew a crowd of 75,000 people in Portland over the weekend. 75,000 people. That’s one person for every six residents of Portland, there to hear a politician speak. The New York Times described the crowd as a multitude. When is the last time a multitude came out to see a politician in America? A pope, maybe. Or U2. But not a politician. What was odd is that other major US dailies failed to treat a turnout the size of a small city at a political rally as anything remarkable, or particularly newsworthy. The LA Times mentioned it, four paragraphs into a story about Obama’s attacks against John McCain on social security, lobbyists and foreign policy. It was hard to find any reference to the Portland multitude on the Washington Post’s site, which also gave greater prominence to the McCain/lobbyist story. There isn’t necessarily anything nefarious or conspiratorial in the corporate media’s failure to give the Obama/Portland story more play. Big media like stories about conflict. They like “gotcha” narratives. But every once in a while we are reminded that there is something extraordinary occurring in American politics, and the nonchalant media coverage of a seismic event, such as what happened in Portland, ought not to mask that.